


First, Do No Harm

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Community: weissday, Gen, Mild Language, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-19
Updated: 2008-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not what the doctor tells you that matters, it's what they don't. On investigating a string of deaths at a holistic clinic, Weiss discover something far more sinister than dangerous drugs or botched treatments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Repertory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Standard Copyright Disclaimer: _Weiss Kreuz_ is, quite obviously, not mine. It is in fact the intellectual property of Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo and Movic, amongst several others both in Japan and Stateside. This is a fan work written for fun, not out of any notion of personal gain, and on the off-chance that anyone did decide to pay me for doing this (which they won't) I would just spend the lot on Weiss-related merchandise, so any money would make its way back into the coffers of them as deserve it anyway.
> 
> Author's Notes: Written for the Weissday fic exchange on Livejournal, this fic owes its existence to a prompt from Kat, also known as Genkischuldich, who wanted to read a fic involving Weiss working through a mission. One month of working my ass off later, in between far-too-frequent bouts of illness, I managed to deliver this fic just in time to make the community deadline. It was surprisingly liberating to write a fic which involved precisely no romantic complication for once, just Weiss doing their thing. Thanks must go not only to Genkischuldich for running Weissday and providing the prompt, but also to an RL friend of mine whom I have bored to tears about _Weiss Kreuz_, who set his plot brain loose on my extremely tenuous ideas and made it possible for me to get this fic written in the first place.

_There is a remedy for everything; it is called death.  
_ Portuguese Proverb

Tuesday hadn't even started well.

Eight AM and there was, Youji had always said, a terrible inevitability about mornings in the _Koneko_. There'd be Aya, fussing over the orchids with an eyedropper and the rich, brown exhalations of the coffee maker mingling with the scent of soil and pollen and damp, and the susurration of shivering leaves as the bamboo they still hadn't found a buyer for was carried out to its spot on the pavement. Cut flowers and ceramic pots and Omi in the kitchen snatching a hurried breakfast before he left for school, and Ken—

Ken should have known better than to go running in a rainstorm, but he hadn't been willing to let a little thing like the weather cramp his style. He was a healthy kid, always had been, Ken didn't _get_ sick and anyway, everyone knew all that crap about getting ill just from going out in the rain was an old wives' tale. That had been yesterday: today Ken had risen late with a fever and a dry, unpleasant cough and Omi had taken one look at him and, in the face of Ken's repeated protestations that he felt absolutely fine, _really_, had ordered him back to bed.

Condemning Youji to the morning shift, and hours and hours of Aya Fujimiya. Looked like he was cursed to spend his days round people who were Good At Mornings, and at least _Ken_ he could complain to…

Really, Ken should have known better.

Youji didn't like the morning shift at the best of times and he made his distaste known by sleeping through as many of them as Omi's careful rotas would allow; it wasn't a problem when Ken was there to pick up the slack, but when he wasn't? Stupid for a flower shop to open so early but when the bulk of your custom came from high-school girls with hormone complexes, didn't it make sense? God knew what the early rush did with the flowers when they got to school.

God only knew what the Hell he was doing up. Youji hadn't appreciated, after his decidedly gaudy night, being informed by a disgustingly chipper and healthy-looking Omi that Ken was feeling bad and had gone back to bed, and he was going to have to pick up the slack. Ken owed him for this, Youji thought as he slumped by the register and struggled to unlock it. Big time.

Across the room, Aya had finished with the orchids and, closing the glass display cases, crossed to the front of the store to raise the shutters, letting the morning sun flood into the shadowy shop. Youji winced, and – _God damn it, Aya _– shielded his eyes with one raised hand.

It was, almost, a relief to spot Manx's ankles.

Immaculately turned out, in spite of the earliness of the hour, in blazing crimson and haloed by the light that spilled in through the half-open shutters, Manx stood waiting on the pavement. Patient and poker-faced as a statue, she could have been standing there for hours. An utterly unremarkable buff folder was tucked under one of her arms

Of course, they had all known it was coming. It had been far too long without a word, and the weird thing was it was the long waits that were the worst. To be thrown from one mission to the next, ready or not, with barely time to catch one's breath was bad; to spend week on dragging, tedious week with nothing to do but play at floristry and wonder at the silence, and try to handle one another, was somehow far worse. Weiss hadn't been formed to waste their days on begonias, curling ribbon and stock taking, or on giddy high-schoolers, fastidious yet fickle society brides, and energetic old ladies dropping in to pass the time of day with Momoe.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss _Manx_," Youji said, camouflaging genuine surprise behind a slow and languid smile. "You're here early. Couldn't stay away?"  
"Well," Manx said with a toss of her head, "I must say that's a far friendlier greeting than I might have expected."  
Youji grinned. "What can I say? Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

Manx – well, Kudou, what did you expect? – merely smiled coolly as if she had heard nothing, walking into the still-dormant store like an actress strutting the stage, cool and collected as if she had absolutely every right to be there. Small and curvaceous yet effortlessly commanding, she let her presence speak for itself.

"Good morning, Balinese, Abyssinian…" She inclined her head briefly in Aya's direction, a gesture that included. "Is Bombay still around?"  
"Omi? I haven't seen him. Hey, Aya, has Omi—"  
"No." Aya cut him off, his voice calm and inflectionless. "He's still here."

Aya should have been anal about routine. It would have fitted with the rest of it: the focus so single-minded that it verged on the obsessive, the utterly needless mania for secrecy that carried over into everything he did. He folded his shirts like he worked for Armani, leaving them so neatly pressed it seemed a crime to sully them by shaking out the creases, and slipping them on. That he reacted to Manx's sudden presence by _not_ reacting – simply reaching back up to close the shutters again, not even acknowledging the startled looks of a couple of early-rising schoolgirls – seemed, to Youji, somehow wrong.

The shutters, with a rattle and a clang, snapped closed, Aya shooting Youji a look that betrayed absolutely nothing of what he might have been feeling and left his pale face a scrupulous blank. Maybe, to Aya, this was just another habit.

"I'll go find the others," Aya said.

He didn't wait for an answer, simply slipped off his apron and vanished into the back rooms. Leaving the break room door slightly ajar and Youji stranded with Manx, suddenly feeling uncomfortably like an awkward teenager on a not-entirely-successful date. Oh well, unsuccessful date or not, they didn't have to stand in silence…

"What's the deal with the morning call, then, if it's not for the sheer joy of my company?"  
Manx laughed briefly, tapping her manicured nails against the buff folder she carried: it was an answer in itself. "I'm afraid, Balinese, that it would take rather more than the prospect of seeing you to get me here so early."  
"Huh," Youji said thoughtfully. "This has gotta be some mission. Takatori again?"  
"Actually, no," Manx replied, noting Youji's look of surprise. "But the rest can wait until the briefing."

* * *

When Aya walked in, Omi Tsukiyono was having waveforms for breakfast.

Mr. Yamamoto's physics quizzes were, for Class 3-A, a Tuesday tradition. First thing after break, Mr. Yamamoto would check his students had been paying attention during the last week by giving them a ten-minute quiz. The quiz, for Omi, was seldom a challenge, but it never hurt to make sure. Double-checking his physics notes on Tuesday mornings had, for Omi, become routine – a routine that, today, had been interrupted by shooing a clearly feverish Ken back into his bedroom, then dragging a hungover Youji out of his.

By the time Aya arrived, padding silently into the kitchen and waiting, quiet as a ghost, at the foot of the stairs, Omi was in no mood for another interruption. Sighing, he looked up from the textbook he had spread in front of him and tried not to look too hard done by. Aya always had walked too quietly.

"Aya-kun? I thought you were opening up…"  
"We have a mission."

And that was all that needed to be said.

Conscientious as always, Omi had stopped to call his school before heading to the basement. Yes, this is Tsukiyono from 3-A… could you please tell Mr. Nakata that I won't be able to come in today? Yes, I'm afraid I'm not well… stomach pains, I couldn't eat at all this morning. Yes Ma'am, I will be sure to see a doctor…

He sighed as he placed the phone back down in its cradle, letting his hand rest on the smooth, cool plastic of the receiver for just a second before turning to the stairs, his breakfast half-finished and his schoolbooks abandoned. For all he was a consummate liar, and for all he understood the necessity of it, Omi never had liked lying to his teachers. Tuesdays were always interesting, physics quizzes and all; he had a science project to work on, and he hated the thought of letting down his group with yet another period of inexplicable absence.

Kritiker, of course, came first; for Omi it always would. Mr. Yamamoto would just have to wait.

It wasn't exactly a surprise. It had been too quiet for too long, with nothing but the swirling currents of rumor to give him any insight into what the shadows still hid; the girls in the shop, talking in whispers behind their hands, trading tall tales and urban myths no responsible adult would believe a word of. The papers pontificated about Takatori and his rivals or obsessed over trivia – a young actress's malfunctioning wardrobe, a younger singer's failing marriage, with truth trapped somewhere between the lines of print. Rumor: only that, and near-impossible to find the truth in it…

Don't knock rumor, Youji had said once: Omi couldn't remember when, or why, or even who he had said it to. He'd just said it and it must have been years back now, back when it all began. Before Takatori and Esset, before Aya even. Before it had all gotten so much more complicated. Don't knock rumor. Peel away the distortions, unpick the hyperbolic flourishes, and you'll usually find a statement of fact… it's simply a matter of knowing what to ignore.

Weiss knew it better than most – but even the rumor mill had been eerily quiet as of late and that, of course, didn't prove a thing. The shadows remained.

Omi smiled brightly at Manx as he stepped from the spiral stairway and into the darkened basement, perching on the edge of one of the armchairs and holding one hand out for the data folder, which Manx passed him without a word. Opening it a crack, he stole a quick glimpse inside it, furtive as a child who had torn the corner of the wrapping from his Christmas present three days too soon. Youji was already there, sprawled at one end of the couch and listing slightly to starboard, eyes closed and hair spilling across the back of the seat; eight in the morning, he often said, was a time that simply shouldn't exist.

"Youji-kun," Omi said suspiciously, looking up from the folder he held, "do you feel all right?"  
"Sure I do, Omi," Youji said vaguely. He didn't open his eyes. "Don't sweat it."  
Omi sighed – well of course I'm going to sweat it, Youji, if it looks like you're going to fall asleep in the briefing. "Youji-kun, please. It's not _that_ early."  
"Early enough for me, kiddo," Youji said sleepily; he did, at least, condescend to open his eyes, sit up a little straighter.

Aya, moving as ever far too quietly, slipped down the stairs with Ken, every bit the irritable younger sibling taking exception to being ordered around by someone he felt had very little right to, a few dragging, resentful paces behind him. Okay, I'm here, what else do you want? He was fully dressed save for shoes, and trying desperately not to look as if he were ill; from the way he blinked, though, and the bleary, half-alert look in his eyes, Aya had startled him from sleep. Abandoning Aya by the wall – the redhead folding his arms and leaning back, as if he had nothing to do with any of it – Ken slumped down onto the other end of the sofa in an undignified, adolescent slouch; the cushions sighed in protest as he dropped heavily down onto them, shoulders shifting as he tried to get comfortable.

Manx didn't speak; her gaze, schoolmistress-stern, said only _good, let's get on with this_. A quick glance about the room, checking they were all present and about as alert as they were going to get, and she was stepping over to the video, bending over to slip the cassette inside the machine—

—and Youji's head slumped forward, his eyelids slipping closed.

Omi opened his mouth to speak; Ken got there first. He leaned over, nudged Youji not-too-gently with one elbow. "Hey, Youji, you _alive_ in there?"  
"Okay," Youji said weakly, "okay, I'm paying attention…"

Even this was a routine, of a kind. Manx ushered them to the basement, a sheepdog rounding up her little flock, and dimmed the lights, the television flickered into life and there on the screen, veiled as always in shadow, was the form of a man who knew each of them intimately, and who, for Weiss, was little more than a digital phantom: a silhouetted shape, a made-up name, a distorted voice – and no sign of the human form that must have been caught behind it. They had met him, yet Persia might as well never have existed at all. There was, to Omi's mind, something peculiar and terribly disquieting about that.

He hid it, of course. What else could he do? Hands resting on his knees, he gazed intently at the screen. After all, you never could be sure how much of this would be on the test.

The mission was simple, yet mystifying. All over the city, people were falling down dead and all their doctors could say was, _this was natural_. Previously healthy adults were dying from massive tumors that formed in days and utterly consumed their bodies, or from sudden and inexplicable strokes; they were found in the street without a mark on them, paralyzed from the neck down. An Olympic hopeful had died of a heart defect that had only ever been seen in newborns. A company president had been rushed to Saint Luke's with all the symptoms of Graft-Versus-Host Disease. Someone was doing this to them and none of them remembered who, they'd just been to this clinic and _Hunters of Light_—

The perfect murder is the one which looks only natural.

"Wait," Ken said; his voice sounded unused, something long ago left to rust struggling to function again. "Wait, there's no—" He broke off to cough convulsively, eyes closed, one hand held before his mouth. He really, Omi thought, ought to wear a cold mask. "Did anyone else get a target name?"  
"There was no name given, Ken," Aya replied.  
Ken turned to look at him, blinking once, twice, in clear confusion. "How does that work? If there's no name, how are we supposed to find them?"  
Omi frowned thoughtfully. "I'm guessing we can work around that. There was a clinic name…"

The boy spoke distractedly; it sounded more as if he were thinking aloud than trying to answer Ken's question. Opening the folder he held on his knees, Omi flipped quickly through it again, his head bowed and an over-long hank of blonde hair tumbling into his eyes.

"Ah, here it is." He straightened. "Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic. The target works here, Manx-san?"  
"The _prospective_ target," Manx corrected him, flipping the lights back on somewhat belatedly; Omi frowned, looking almost as lost as Ken. "I'm afraid Kritiker have been unable to conclusively confirm the target's identity. The victims, however, have one thing in common: in the weeks before their deaths, they all had a consultation at Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic for minor ailments unrelated to the diseases they died of. The target, therefore, could be either of the doctors at the clinic, or both of them, or a third party they have been referring certain clients onto."  
"I see," Omi said thoughtfully.  
"So the clinic staff could be totally innocent?" Ken asked.  
Aya unfolded his arms, stepping slightly away from the wall – an understated gesture that still effortlessly drew attention to himself. "It's possible, but unlikely. Manx, do we have anything on these doctors?"  
"Basic personal data," Manx replied, bending to Omi and leafing through the file he held, pulling free a couple of sheets of printouts and holding them out to him. "I must stress, however, that no action has been sanctioned against either of these people at present. Bombay, I'll be counting on you to contact Kritiker when you have confirmed the target's identity. Am I to take it you're all in?"

She was answered by a single brisk nod from Aya, all his attention already on the sheaf of printouts Manx had handed him. Youji – yeah, I'm in – stood up, and tried to read over his shoulder; Aya shooed him away, and he stepped back smiling, with his hands raised as if to show he had no designs on Aya's reading matter. Omi said nothing; he hardly had to. You can count on me, Manx-san… Even if he'd had the option to turn the mission down, he wouldn't have dreamed of doing so. Instead, he closed the folder and tossed it onto the small central table then, resting the flat of one arm along the back of his overstuffed chair, turned to look at Ken.

"Ken-kun, are you going to be okay to—"  
"In." Ken cut him off, his brows drawing sharply downward when he caught the look that had crept across Omi's face. "Oh for fuck's sake, it's _just_ a _cough_. I'll be fine by the time we get going."  
"Ken," Youji said simply, "not to put too fine a point on it… you sound like shit."  
"_In_," Ken repeated, "and look who's talking." To drive the point home, he leaned toward the burdened table and snatched up the first thing his fingers touched: a glossily overdesigned, green-and white brochure with _Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic_ printed on the front in flowing, unctuous _kanji_. Flipping it open, he slumped heavily back against the couch cushions and glared at Youji over the top of it, as if daring him to speak again.  
Youji shrugged, clearly unwilling to push the matter any further. "Well," he said, as if it didn't matter either way, "suit yourself, but don't blame me if you drop down dead."

Omi – honestly, Ken could be so stubborn – simply sighed and shook his head, and went to turn on the computer, and tried to pretend that a small part of him wasn't glad of it. Ken-kun, you're an idiot. I knew you wouldn't let us down.

* * *

Six hours later and dust motes danced in the mid-afternoon sun as it slanted in through the kitchen windows: Omi, stood by the counter making tea, was a study in cheerful concentration. Behind him Aya and Youji, ostensibly taking a late lunch, were gathered about the kitchen table, strewn with files and photos and spread-out sheaves of printer paper, all spread out across the surface like a bizarre makeshift tablecloth. The contents of Manx's data file meeting and marrying with the sum total of the morning's researches, in print format.

Omi hadn't been surprised to note that there was no sign of Ken.

"Omi," Youji said in something akin to admiration, "you're at light speed on this one."  
Omi smiled at his friend over his shoulder, but shrugged, brushing off the compliment. "It's not hard to find this stuff. You can get quite a lot from a name and a birth-date." Though, he added privately, you probably wouldn't get much that was relevant from one of ours.  
"Well," Youji said wryly, "they can't all be paranoiacs, I guess… so these are our targets?"  
"Prospective targets," Aya corrected him. "Unless there's a third party."  
"I haven't been able to find any connection to one, but of course that doesn't mean there _isn't_ one, does it? I think at least one of them knows something, Aya-kun. I'm just not sure—oh, just a minute."

The kettle steamed and burbled quietly to itself by the boy's elbow, turning itself off with a small, soft _click_. Omi (does anyone else want tea?) turned away from the table and the others, busying himself by filling the teapot and hurrying through the usual last-minute search for cups and plates, grabbing a half-opened packet of biscuits as an afterthought. He hadn't really realized he was humming under his breath, a snatch of a song Ken had liked, when they first met. He reminded himself to go check on Ken, just as soon as he'd talked things through with the others. Maybe Ken would want tea, too…

Aya _hadn't_ wanted tea, and he raised his brows slightly when Omi placed a cup down in front of him anyway, pushing aside a few of the papers that rested beside him. It's just so much friendlier, the boy might have said, if we all drink together. Aya, of course, might have wanted to live set apart from the rest of them but why, Omi thought, should he get away with that?

He sat, the legs of his chair scraping slightly across the kitchen floor, and sipped his tea. Two-twenty and he should have been sat in Miss Imari's math class, and here he was in the kitchen sipping hot tea… maybe one of the girls would bring his homework over, later.

"So, then," Youji asked, leaning back into his chair and lighting a cigarette, "what've we got?"  
"Well," Omi said, placing his mug down in front of him, fingers spread to warm themselves against the striped china, "there's nothing conclusive, I'm afraid, and as I was saying I can't rule out the possibility there's someone else involved. I think we're getting somewhere, though."

We'll start, Omi said, with the clinic.

Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic turned out to be a relatively new concern. It was founded in 1991 by a former oncologist – his name, to Omi's surprise, had turned out to be Amano, not Chiba – who had made the switch to alternative therapies after becoming disenchanted with Western medicine and the medical establishment. His own clinic, in the words of its own glossy brochures and barely less overdesigned website, offered patients a gentle and holistic system of therapy that was individually tailored to their own physical, mental and emotional symptoms, via the miracles of homeopathic medicine.

Aya had never heard of homeopathy. Youji once knew a girl who suggested he take diluted monkshood when he'd cancelled a date with a five-minute fever that was actually a knife wound to the thigh. Was that the same thing?  
"Yes, Youji-kun," Omi said. "that was a homeopathic cure. Alternative medicine's kind of popular with some people."  
Youji took a drag on his cigarette. "So it's a girl thing, right? _Plant_ extracts…"  
"It's not just plant extracts," Omi replied, "and I doubt it's just a girl thing. But I don't think taking it would have done you much good. _If_ you'd had a fever, I mean. A lot of these remedies are so diluted they're basically just water."  
"So it's a scam," Aya cut in.  
"I think it's a little more complicated than that, Aya-kun. I'm pretty sure most of the practitioners genuinely believe it works."

Doctor Keisuke Amano didn't look like anyone's idea of a holistic doctor. He was, at forty-nine, still tall, handsome and husky, his hair thick and glossy as that of a man half his age – and, like so many oversized men, he was by all accounts gentle and considerate, and inclined to contemplation. He had been a good oncologist, but had been worn down by prescribing the best treatments science could devise and money could buy only to watch his patients waste away before his eyes, and then die anyway. He had suffered a breakdown, he had found religion. He had invested his life savings to open Thousand Leaves.

"Sounds like a holistic mid-life crisis," Youji said. "He just chose the Buddha, not a babe."  
Omi smiled, but ignored the interruption. "Whatever influenced him, it doesn't seem to have done him any harm. His clinic's always had a very good reputation – at least it did have, up till now."

From almost as soon as it opened its doors, Thousand Leaves had turned a profit. Homeopathy was a godsend for rich, stressed urbanites who weren't very ill, and upwardly-mobile mothers who refused to entrust their children to the clinical so-called horrors of Western medicine. Doctor Amano was kindly and attentive; he listened to his patients' stories and nodded in all the right places. His remedies were gentle and natural, with none of the hideous side-effects the cancer drugs he had spent so many years prescribing had caused. His patients, or many of them, got better.

Three years after the clinic was founded, Doctor Amano had moved to a brighter, more spacious office, in a rather wealthier neighborhood. Three years after that, he had looked again at his finances and at his burgeoning caseload and decided it was high time he hired a second therapist.

In August 1997, Doctor Takagawa began work at Thousand Leaves.

"That's her," Omi said, fishing a photograph from amongst the clutter on the table.  
Youji gave a long, low whistle. "Well, _hey_ there, Miss Venice Beach. How the Hell'd you get _that_ surname?"  
"She's married," Aya said, as if it should have been obvious.  
"And that, Youji-kun," Omi said with a bright smile, "means she's very definitely _taken_. Family registry says she's the wife of a Doctor Shigeru Takagawa. He's an anesthesiologist. They married early last year."

Elizabeth Takagawa told her patients to call her Liza. Tall and slender and twenty-eight, with strawberry-blonde hair, a peaches-and-cream complexion and a wide, stars-and-stripes smile, she was the very picture of an American girl. Her residency, she said on the clinic website, had left her disillusioned by conventional medicine. Ladies who disliked the thought of consulting a male therapist about their conditions could talk to her in the strictest confidence…

Then the deaths had started.

Neither of them looked or acted like a murderer, and that meant precisely nothing.

"Basically," Omi said, taking a sip of his slightly tepid tea, "we're looking at a six-year time-span in which nothing happens save for Doctor Amano building up his business. Then he decides to expand, hires Doctor Takagawa, and all of a sudden his patients are dying. First theory: Doctor Amano was planning this—" whatever, he thought, it turns out to be, "—all along and hired Takagawa to throw investigators off his trail, making Doctor Amano the target."  
"And he _is_ a former cancer specialist," Youji said. "Manx said a lot of the victims died of sudden cancers, he could be…"  
"No. Amano's all wrong for this."

Aya spoke with such assurance it caught his teammates off-guard. Youji blinked, an expression of almost comedic confusion crossing his face; Omi raised his head, brows furrowed. _Aya-kun?_

"We can't be sure of that, Aya-kun," Omi said reasonably. "As far as the clinic staff go I'm most inclined to suspect Doctor Takagawa, but we can't exactly rule Doctor Amano out yet. Besides, they still might be working together. Second theory, part A: Doctor Takagawa is the target. She joined the clinic because it gave ready access to a pool of potential victims. Second theory, part B: Doctor Takagawa is the one who had the idea, but convinced or coerced Doctor Amano into helping her, which would make them _both_ targets."  
"Whoa," Youji said, holding up his hands as if he were directing traffic. "Wait a sec. You're saying this is right for Takagawa? I'm not seeing a motive for her, either."  
"There's no motive for either of them," Aya said, "as far as we know."  
Omi sighed, and hoped Youji hadn't caught it. Of course Youji would want to believe in the woman's innocence, for no reason other than she was young and attractive… "The husband, of course, could be the third party. _They_ could be in it together, or _he_ could be manipulating _her_. That's the third theory, and theory four would revolve around an as-yet unknown third party. I don't think I much care for theory four."

Privately, Omi didn't much care for any of it. The more he thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that Kritiker could have deemed a string of natural deaths to be _somebody's fault_. The victims – _victims_? – had died of illness. No matter how ugly and sudden their deaths may have been, they had been utterly natural. They must have been. Nobody could make someone else sick, not like that. No existing drug could provoke the human body to turn upon itself in such sudden and varied ways… and this, if Kritiker was to be believed, was illness used as a weapon, cancers like gunshots and strokes like the slash of a blade.

Omi trusted Kritiker implicitly; he hardly knew how not to. If they thought the doctors at Thousand Leaves were potential targets, they had to be – but that didn't change the fact this mission made no sense to him. Surely it wasn't possible to induce a healthy adult to suffer a stroke? Was there perhaps some logical reason: a statistical fluke, or a string of bad luck?

"So, where does that leave us?" Youji asked.  
"The first step," Omi said, "is to see if we can clear Doctor Amano. Youji-kun… how's your head at the moment?"

And he smiled, like a child with a secret.

* * *

For what better way was there to get the measure of Doctor Amano than meeting him? The man was, after all, a doctor. He'd help anyone provided they could pay, and Kritiker's money was as good as anybody else's. Invent an ailment then ask for a cure: herbs or minerals, diluted. It was hardly as if they would then have to take it. What could be more natural than that?

But you have, Omi said, to go down together.

That, Aya supposed, was as good an explanation as any for the presence, in the passenger seat of his Porsche, of one Youji Kudou. All foppish clothes and pale, floppy hair, smelling of expensive cologne and warm leather and, as a grace-note, ever so slightly of cigarettes.

Of course he understood the logic behind it. Thousand Leaves Clinic was a dangerous place for anyone to be, not just for an undercover assassin; doubly so as Weiss had no idea how the target selected their victims, or how it was they could induce them to fall ill. A first-time patient – a young man, with no wife or children to worry about what happened to him – who came in alone might very well have been seen as nothing more than easy pickings. At least, if the staff knew there was someone waiting for this patient, they would be less inclined to casually harm them.

So Aya and Youji were to go down together, and make it obvious to the staff they _were_ together. One of them was to go for the consultation, it didn't much matter who; the other was to wait in the reception area. Whoever felt most like being Haruki Nagata – a stressed-out college student, suffering from sleeplessness and tension headaches – could be, and the small tape player which would be left recording in the pocket of the patient's coat was merely a courtesy detail. The coat pocket, Omi admitted, was not an ideal place to hide a surveillance device, but they couldn't risk anything else. They couldn't be sure what a holistic consultation might involve. Anything concealed beneath clothing might be detected on a physical, and the smaller, discreeter bugs wouldn't be able to continuously record for long enough…

"I'm not sending Ken-kun," Omi had said.  
"Why on earth not?" Youji asked, and he sounded genuinely curious. "_He's_ actually sick."  
"That," Omi had replied, "is why I'm not sending him."

(All he was saying was, it's too dangerous.)

And Omi himself, of course, was better used elsewhere: embodiment of a game of chess. The teenager had already made his way down into the basement by the time Aya left, head bowed over the computer screen as he gently coaxed the clinic's computer systems into letting him in. You two take the front door; I'll slip in round the back…

"I think," Youji said thoughtfully, "it'd work better if you were the one to see the doctor."  
"Oh?" Aya felt himself frowning, glancing briefly and suspiciously at Youji from the very corners of his narrow eyes. "Why would that be?"  
"Because, Aya my man, there'll be a receptionist," Youji said, with a wink and a grin, "and chances are she'll be bored out of her pretty little mind. It's amazing what you can get out of those girls if you just ask nice."

Like a promise to meet up for drinks—but Youji, at least, was an old hand at mixing business with pleasure. He would drift up to the reception desk and lower his sunglasses and give the girl a slow, lazy smile that would have her (if the shy type) coloring and averting her eyes, or (if she was bold and brazen) grinning and tossing her head. He would lean heavily on the counter and rest his chin on his hand and ask all the right questions, and do it all in such a sly and subtle way that the girl wouldn't even realize she was the subject not of an idle flirtation, but a thorough cross-examination. People opened out to Youji in a way they simply didn't to Aya. He put strangers on edge; Youji put them at their ease.

The worst thing about it was that it wasn't such a bad idea. Aya sighed, and concentrated on the road.

The traffic was bad, of course. Tokyo during the morning rush on a wet and windy Wednesday; it didn't know what else to be and Youji fidgeting and fussing in the seat beside him, and gazing disconsolately out of the window at the rain rattling sporadically on the glass. Aya felt himself frowning and _this_, Youji said dryly, with a melodramatic gesture that seemed far too large for the cramped confines of Aya's car, is why we have a delivery _bike_.

It seemed to take far longer than it ought have done to reach Sumida-ku. The street Aya turned into could have been any street. It could have been their street, quiet and unremarkable, scattered with ailing urban trees and lined with a near-identical parade of small, neat shops – a bookshop, a delicatessen, a scattering of clothing stores, a small, slightly faded family restaurant, its shutters still tightly drawn – though the rush-hour crowded sidewalks seemed rather narrower, the buildings taller, huddled close as if for protection against the chill.

Thousand Leaves Clinic turned out to occupy the first floor of a low-lying concrete-and-steel building which, though it lacked the picture windows and elaborate façade, was not too dissimilar to the _Koneko_: storefront at street level, small apartments above. Small, trim, quietly prosperous, it didn't, to Aya's mind, look all that different from any other small clinic offering acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine, or chiropractic, or any of a dozen other treatments that no doubt would work best on the worried well.

"So that's it?" Youji said quietly, turning in his seat to get a better look at the building. "Well, well. Our Doctor Amano's got to be doing pretty nicely for himself…"

Aya said nothing. All this, of course, they knew from the brochure.

Inside was all warmth and light and nothing whatever to see. Just a small waiting room with three white-painted doors, all closed, leading off from it – two consulting rooms, one with 'staff only' printed on it in large, blocky _kanji_. A slightly tired-looking dracaena wilted beside a group of low-slung leather chairs, a couple of which were occupied by equally tired-looking patients. They sat huddled around a small glass-topped table on which someone had laid out the usual collection of dull old lifestyle magazines. It looked like every other private clinic Aya had ever been in. It looked harmless.

There _was_ a receptionist, tucked neatly away behind a high wooden desk, surrounded by filing cabinets and little display stands laden with boxes and phials of homeopathic preparations. She was cute as Youji could have wished, all doe eyes and shining black hair pinned up in a _chignon_. The usual smiling, standardized young beauty so similar to every other receptionist Aya had ever seen it was mildly disturbing.

He couldn't remember actually agreeing to Youji's ridiculous plan – you deal with the doctor; I'll be right out here flirting with this pretty girl – but there was Youji, hanging discreetly back by the huddled armchairs and pretending an interest he didn't possess in the view of the street through the rain-smeared plate-glass doors. Clearly Youji wasn't going to be pretending he was ill any time soon: Aya spared him a small frown and, somewhat to his own surprise, found himself walking over to the receptionist. Would it be possible to see Doctor Amano?

The girl started: she had, Aya realized with no surprise at all, been staring at Youji. "I'm sorry, sir?"  
"I'd like," Aya repeated, "to see Doctor Amano."  
"Doctor Amano, Doctor Amano…" The girl bent her head over her computer, tapping delicately away at the keys for a minute before raising her head. "Yes, he should be able to fit you in this morning. Can I take your name?"  
"Nagata," Aya said. "Haruki Nagata."  
"Okay… and your date of birth?"  
"July the fourth, 1978." You never, Youji had said once, _never_ go by a fake birthdate, not unless you're very confident, or very stupid, or very, _very_ desperate. Give the wrong name, wear a wig, talk with a Tohoku accent – change whatever else you like, but never change your birthday. It's too difficult to keep straight, and much too easy to get caught out. Nobody has to hesitate when asked what day they were born.  
"Thank you… would I be right in saying this was your first appointment with Doctor Amano, Nagata-san?" When Aya nodded, the girl turned in her seat, tugging a sheet of paper from a cubbyhole and handing it to him, along with a disposable ballpoint. "Doctor Amano requires all new patients to fill out a questionnaire before their first consultation. The doctors at this clinic are holistic practitioners – that means they're not only concerned with your symptoms but also with you as a person. The more information you provide, the better the doctor will be able to help you… You needn't worry, it's all strictly confidential."

She gave him a diffident smile and turned back to her computer, eyes drifting briefly back over to Youji. The blonde (maybe he had sensed her gaze?) glanced over at the pair of them, raising his eyebrows as Aya walked over to the chairs: a comic parody of surprise. It would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so predictable. Youji was, after all, all about the show. Aya ignored him, merely dropping down into one of the leather chairs – a surprisingly boyish action that had Youji blinking – and unfurling the questionnaire, balancing the glasses he usually only used for reading on the end of his nose.

He had expected the demographic data: name and date of birth, and current occupation. Expected the questions about his condition, his perceptions of his general health and is this your first consultation with a holistic practitioner, how did you hear about Thousand Leaves Clinic? He had even expected Youji discreetly reading over his shoulder.

Then there were the questions about his temperament (did he consider himself the nervous sort?) and if the time of day or the weather affected his moods and, if so, how. He hadn't expected them, nor had he expected to be discreetly interrogated about whether his sex life satisfied him, and how he got on with the spouse-stroke-partner he didn't possess. It left him feeling obscurely irritated, like a child who had diligently prepared for an exam only to open his paper and find an entire section of questions he had no idea he was going to be asked.

No wonder the receptionist had wanted to reassure him that anything he said would stay between him and Doctor Amano.

"Huh," Youji said. "So that's a holistic questionnaire?"  
Aya glanced back up at him, raising a single narrow brow. "What were you expecting?"  
Youji smirked at him. It was the kind of smile that could only accompany an exceptionally silly answer. "Wholemeal paper."

With a stroke of the pen, Aya drew a single contemptuous line through the questions about his sex life. _Not applicable_. Lack of sex, no matter what Youji may have claimed, couldn't cause so much as an imaginary headache.

A few more prospective patients walked in, smelling of the cold and of their own damp clothes – a girl, plain but plump-calved and bosomy, briefly lingered in the porch to shake out her umbrella where Youji gave her a bored once-over before resuming his study of the trim little receptionist. The receptionist ducked her head and tried not to smile too much, and called for a Miyamori-san. A pinch-faced woman in a pale, expensive-looking coat got to her feet and vanished into one of the consulting rooms. Aya finished the questionnaire and flipped back through it idly; to an outsider, Haruki Nagata might merely have seemed bored.

"We need a copy of that," Youji murmured, so quietly Aya had difficulty hearing. "Try and hang onto it."  
Aya didn't turn to him. He merely said, in a near-whisper, "they'll keep it," and thought he heard Youji sigh.  
"Then try and remember what it says."

A door creaked open and an elderly man, so spry it was anyone's guess what he could have needed the clinic for, walked out into the reception area, pausing to pay his bill and exchange a few words with the receptionist. Doctor Amano would see Nagata -san now.


	2. The Repertory

It was quiet in the basement, quiet and cool and gloomy – the still not of a tomb but of a library, a living, breathing silence made all the thicker by its calculated nature. There was nothing to hear but the usual flurry of soft _clicks_ that accompanied Omi's typing but, if he lifted his hands from the lozenge-smooth keys and listened, the boy could just about hear the _ting_ of the shop bell, the grumbling purr of passing cars on the street above his head, and the whisper of the storm, and the soft, almost tidal sound of Ken's breathing, slow and deep and even.

Ken, Omi knew, had meant well: that was his problem. Ken always meant well. He had wandered downstairs a half-hour ago, dazed and feverish and sleep-tousled, clutching a check blanket in one hand. I want to help, he had said hoarsely when Omi had asked why he was up. It's not right, all of you busting your asses while I'm doing fuck-all. It's just a cold, I'm _fine_, there are only so many wide shows you can watch. I just want something to _do_… Now Ken was curled up on the couch beneath the blanket, a scattered slack of printouts from clinic records spread out on the table before him. He held an uncapped highlighter loosely in one hand. He could almost have looked diligent, if only he had been awake.

Omi didn't want to wake him, but he didn't have much choice.

It would embarrass Ken to know that he had been sleeping – not only sleeping, but caught at it. Omi turned in his chair, gazing at Ken's blanket-shrouded form for perhaps a fraction too long, and then cleared his throat.

"Ken-kun," he said a little too loudly, "are you getting anything?"

Nothing. No response. Ken, of course, was perhaps the only one of them who had absolutely no trouble sleeping. The old joke about being able to sleep through bombs going off next door might, Youji had quipped once, actually have been true where it related to Ken. And you should be glad it does, Ken had retorted, God knows nobody else would put up living next to _your_ noisy ass for any time at all…

It was really no wonder he hadn't so much as stirred. Oh well, forget Ken's pride… Omi got to his feet and, bending over Ken, gave his friend's shoulder a small shake.

"Ken-kun, wake up. I need to ask you something. Ken-kun, can you hear me? Ken-kun." Ken muttered something small and irritable that sounded very much like _go away _and tried to bat Omi's hand away, and "_Ken-kun_," Omi said again, "I'm really sorry, but I'm going to need you to wake up now. I want to talk to you." He smiled, sitting back on his heels and letting his hands fall back by his sides, when Ken opened his eyes and glowered blearily in his general direction.  
"_What_?" Ken asked. Shades of, _and this had better be good_. The cold, Omi thought, was definitely not bringing out the best in him, but Ken never had been a very good patient.  
"You were asleep, Ken-kun," Omi said apologetically. "I'm sorry to wake you, but the mission…"  
"Shit," Ken said, "I was sleeping? Oh, God, Omi. I'm really—"

And Ken had that look on his face again, as if he were wondering how many Hail Marys would get him out of this one: Omi cut off the apology before it could start. "Never mind that. Are you getting anything?"

"Getting anything?" The boy sounded dazed, as if he still couldn't quite work out where he was, still less what the question might mean. "What'd you mean, getting anything?" he asked, and coughed briefly.  
"I mean," Omi said patiently, "how are you doing with the _records_, Ken-kun. Is there any sign of a pattern?"  
"Oh, _that_. No." Ken rubbed at one eye and yawned, pushing himself into a sitting position. The heavy check blanket slipped from about his shoulders, falling to pool about his waist.

Omi reached for the printouts on the table, retrieving – and how the Hell did that get there? – a slightly crushed piece of paper from where Ken had been lying, and a highlighter of his own. Shuffling them together he sat back heavily on the vacated end of the couch and flipped through them for a moment

"I couldn't see anything," Ken volunteered. "I mean, I_ looked, _but_…_"

_But_. Omi sighed. Apart from the clinic, what was there? It was so much easier in detective stories, where the killers were stupid enough to choose the same kind of victim over and over and over again – blonde teenagers at Catholic schools, older men cruising for sex, or young couples, or anything at all as long as there was a pattern – or, failing that, the victims could at least be counted upon to have spoken to the same 911 operator or been tended to by the same nurse, or to have left a bar with the same too-friendly man with the useful distinguishing mark.

It's not like you to care about motive, Omi – but how else were Weiss going to force the target to reveal themselves, if not by providing them with the perfect bait? Weiss didn't know who did it, and with the stakes as high as life and death, they couldn't afford to get it wrong. Any deaths outside the mission parameters would be murder.

And Weiss, Omi thought, are _not_ murderers.

"I thought things would get easier once I'd got the victims' data collated," he said, more to himself than to Ken. "But it's got me absolutely nowhere."  
"The database thing's no good?"  
Omi shook his head. "None at all. I thought there'd be a link between the victims… you know, some kind of reason the target would choose _them_ aside from everyone else who walked through the door, but aside from all being in basically good physical condition there's nothing."  
"Well, isn't that something?" Ken asked. "Being in good condition? If they're seeing a doctor…" And he was coughing again.  
"Not really, Ken-kun. The people who go to homeopathic doctors are mostly what I suppose you'd call the worried well. They tend to have the kind of illnesses regular doctors can't diagnose… they've probably got symptoms, but no organic signs of disease. There's nothing for a doctor to get hold of. I'd guess at least fifty percent of the patients who go to this clinic don't have anything significant wrong with them. No, that's part of it, but it's not something we can count on."

There's something else, Omi thought. I know there's something else. This looks random but it doesn't feel random, nobody calculating enough to make their victims' deaths look utterly natural would pick their prey with their eyes closed. There's got to be another connection. I just can't _find_ it. I can't find it, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there.

"Is Persia sure all this shit's connected?" Ken was asking. "I mean, really, _really_ sure?"  
"He assigned us the mission, Ken-kun. He must be sure." Omi winced inwardly. The answer sounded pat, almost insulting; it was the same kind of nonsense a parent would use to fob off a child. It was one step away from _because I said so_ and by the look on Ken's face he knew it. "Persia's never steered us wrong before," Omi said to the papers he held. "I know it all sounds crazy, but he must have some reason for it, right?"  
Ken said, "I guess." He sounded unconvinced.

But that didn't get them any further. Omi sighed, and handed the printouts back to Ken, and sat back down at the computer, dropping heavily into the chair and feeling it give sickeningly beneath him. He was looking in the wrong place, but where else should he be looking? There was only the clinic.

Sighing, he turned back to the database, clicking through screen after screen of data: he fancied he could almost see the faces of the dead, caught somewhere behind the bland lines of type. Housewives and businessmen; the guitarist of an Indies band Omi had never heard of; a PA, a girl from a good family who had been engaged to be married and had only wanted clear skin in the wedding photos; a disabled builder injured on the job sometime in the eighties, who had presented with chronic pain then collapsed with an aneurysm. The Olympic hopeful, a teenage gymnast who'd baffled her doctors by dying of hypoplastic left heart syndrome – where did she fit in? Where did any of them?

"Ken-kun, why would a gymnast with headaches see a holistic doctor? Wouldn't she have seen a regular doctor?"  
"What good would he do?" Ken asked incredulously. "Do you _know_ how many drugs are banned in sport?"

It was a fair point. Omi sighed, and gazed back at the records, and they told him absolutely nothing. Nothing save that once again innocents were dying, and nobody understood why. Maybe there really was no connection. Maybe there was just the clinic, and it _was_ just a matter of chance…

Maybe Aya would have something, when he came back. Omi hoped he would be okay.

* * *

As Doctor Amano closed the consulting-room door behind him Aya slipped his hand into his coat pocket, letting the _click_ of the latch conceal the softer sound of the tape recorder clicking on.

Amano's office was every bit as unremarkable as the waiting area had been. A couch, a patient's chair, sinks and closets and a heavy wooden desk with an idling computer perched upon it; it wasn't at all what he had expected from a homoeopathist but doctors, Aya supposed, were doctors everywhere, whatever their remedies were.

If the clinic truly _was_ a cover, it was a very big and expensive one. It was a very convincing one.

The only false note was Amano. He reminded Aya what an inadequate thing a photo could be, and how much the camera could miss. Aya had been like that—_is _like that, Ran, she _is_ like that, can't you even remember a single word? No matter how skilled the photographer or how beautiful the composition, she had always photographed incredibly poorly: she would look pretty, she had always looked pretty, but she simply wouldn't look _right_. Ken was the same, to a point – and now here stood Doctor Amano. His picture, head and shoulders, had given the impression of size but in person he was a bear of a man, burly and gruff and uncomfortable in collar and tie. In the flesh, he was startling.

"Nagata-san, isn't it? Please take a seat," Amano gestured with one huge paw to the patient's chair.

Aya would rather have stood but he knew the doctor's request was no request at all, for all it had been veiled with standard medical politeness. Doctors were doctors everywhere… Amano took the questionnaire from him, gave him a reassuring semi-smile as he crossed to his desk. The overstuffed chair creaked slightly beneath him as he sat. Even there he looked comically out of proportion, uneasy as an adult trying to use a desk and chair designed for a grade-schooler. The slim black fountain pen in his hands looked like something one would give to a child.

"This would be your first consultation, Nagata-san?" Amano asked. It wasn't a question, just another medical courtesy. The questionnaire on his lap was all the answer he needed.  
"That's correct," Aya said. Scrupulously polite.  
Amano nodded, glancing down at the questionnaire. "And you're… you said a student. May I ask what you're studying?"  
"Economics." If it wasn't the truth, it wasn't quite a lie either. That, once upon a time, had been the plan… "My father," he volunteered, "wants me to work for him after I graduate."  
"He's in business?" Amano asked, and Aya nodded. "Would you mind if I took a quick look at your questionnaire?"

Of course Haruki Nagata wouldn't mind. (Aya didn't mind. It wasn't as if it was him who was being examined.)

Yet he felt troubled. Back straight, hands folded in his lap, Aya appeared as scrupulously composed as ever but, as he watched Doctor Amano flip through the pages of the questionnaire, occasionally pausing to scratch something in the margins with his toy pen, he was uncomfortably aware that he felt a certain disquiet. Was this what the receptionist meant when she said the doctors here were _holistic practitioners_? Was Doctor Amano trying to put him at his ease, or had even the opening small-talk been part of the examination?

"You mentioned suffering from headaches," Amano said. "Would that be why you're here today?"  
"Yes," Aya said; he nearly left it there, but _say something about western medicine_, Omi had urged, _say normal doctors are no good_ – flatter Amano's prejudices, in other words. Put _him_ at his ease. Added, "Yes, I've had them since I was in high school. I've seen other doctors, but they couldn't find anything the matter."  
Amano merely nodded, as if he expected nothing else. "I see. That must be very trying for you." He said it well, he looked genuinely sympathetic. "Would you like to tell me a bit about these headaches?"

The doctor was watching him: every tic, every mannerism, all the small, telling gestures that added up to Ran and that Aya hadn't quite managed to school himself out of. That was holism.

And Aya, as he lyingly re-created his symptoms, watched Amano back; the bow of his head and the soft _skritch_ of his toy pen over the paper, the serene, self-confident little doctor's smile, the way the man nodded in all the right places, looking suitably grave, and made a little note before firing off another of his increasingly irrelevant questions. The usual smugly ingratiating bedside manner, relic of his days walking the wards – but there was nothing particularly strange about that and, beneath it all, Doctor Amano seemed to be taking him seriously. Perhaps a little too much so for Aya's liking. Haruki Nagata did not, after all, have very much wrong with him. They were just headaches; he just wanted them to go away.

The headaches were worse in the evenings, and after reading. No, they weren't affected by drinking coffee or by the time of the month, or the phases of the moon, or by sex. Yes, lying down in a darkened room helped but who had the time to do that, every time their head was a little sore? How did the headaches feel, asked Doctor Amano solicitously. Like a needle? Like a knife? Like a _bruise_, Aya said, like a bruise on the brain. No, he wasn't sleeping well.

"You're in your final year of college?" Amano asked suddenly.

Taken aback, Aya nodded; he had been expecting another question about the distinction between a pain which _cut_ and a pain which _stabbed_, or whether or not he could eat chocolate, or if his head hurt worse at four in the afternoon or half past two at night.

"Yes… I thought as much." Another little note and Amano was putting his pen aside, turning in his too-small chair to regard Aya with a sympathetic eye. "Nagata-san, I know it might be difficult when you're under such stress, but you really need to try and make more time for yourself. You're in a sport society?"  
"No," Aya said. Added, as an afterthought, "I used to take kendo."  
"I'd see about starting again, regular exercise is very good for sleepiness. In the meantime, I'm going to give you some pills… _Lycopodium Clavatum_. Give this to the receptionist on your way out, she'll know what to do. And I'd suggest that you stop drinking coffee. I know you said it didn't affect your headaches, but the caffeine can't be helping the insomnia."

Amano got to his feet, handed Aya a small slip of paper covered in the scrawled black hieroglyphs that were his handwriting and how the girl would know what that scarcely-legible scribble said Aya had no idea. Here's your prescription, please pay the receptionist before you leave. The standard medical sign-off.

That was normal, too.

* * *

"Nothing," Youji said as he walked back into the basement, casting a sheaf of papers down onto the still-cluttered central table where they almost immediately slipped off and cascaded to the floor. "Either the old man's one Hell of an actor or he knows zip fucking squat."  
"I'd go with _zip fucking squat_," Omi said to his computer, smiling absently at Youji's turn of phrase, and how odd it must have sounded on his own lips. "That was what we were expecting, right, Youji-kun?"  
"Not like this I wasn't," Youji said wearily. "Budge over, Hidaka, if you want to sleep your bed's upstairs."

And he slumped down at the far end of the couch, closing his eyes and settling back with a contented sigh. Ken gave him an affronted look and tugged the edge of his blanket out from beneath Youji's thigh with slightly more force than was entirely necessary, then curled up as far away from Youji as he could without running the risk of falling off the couch. He probably should have been in his own bed.

"How's it going here?" Youji asked.  
Omi shrugged. "Not a lot better, I'm afraid. I was rather hoping that you'd have something." Lifting his fingers from the keys, he glanced up and over his shoulder. "Aya-kun…"

There was tension in Omi's voice, speaking in whispers of a certain balked anxiety. He caught sight of Aya hesitating at the foot of the stairs to fish the tape recorder out of his coat pocket, and heard himself release a breath he hadn't known he was holding. Omi had hardly realized how tense he must have been until the moment that tension broke, and it flooded from him; he must have been waiting all along for Aya to return. Idiot, he chided himself, no wonder you couldn't concentrate—Omi let his gaze linger on the redhead's form – the set of his shoulders, the cant of his head, the grave look in his Egyptian eyes – and he only wished he knew what it was he was looking for.

There was nothing to see. Aya looked absolutely fine.

Omi hardly knew what else he had expected Aya to look like. Whatever was happening to the patients at Thousand Leaves it clearly wasn't happening in the consulting rooms, in broad daylight – and yet, somehow, he had imagined Aya would come back changed. To look pale, pained, ill… _Ridiculous_. This was Aya, and Aya wouldn't be caught off-guard so easily.

"What happened?" Omi asked, gazing anxiously up at Aya, his eyes wide and troubled. "Did they—"  
"No." Aya cut him off. "Nothing. I saw Amano—"  
"Now, we _didn't_ see Miss Venice Beach," Youji chipped in, "which is a pity, 'cause I'd have liked to…"  
Aya ignored him, carrying on as if the interruption hadn't happened. "Amano asked me a lot of questions which didn't have a lot to do with headaches, advised me to start exercising and gave me some pills." It was, the implication went, as bizarre as a trip to the corner store, and disconcerting as a toddlers' group. He placed the little pill box down on the computer table by Omi's elbow, letting his fingers rest on the surface for a moment before turning away, drifting over to his usual spot by the wall and leaning back against it, his face as closed-off and unreadable as ever.  
"I'd say you were both going to be fine," Ken said dryly, then succumbed to another fit of painful-sounding coughs.  
Omi picked up the pill box, turning it over and over in his fingers. It looked genuine enough, the seal unbroken. "Lycopodium clavatum. Do you reckon we should get these analyzed, Aya-kun?"  
"There's no point," Aya said. "Whatever's causing these illnesses, it's not a diluted plant extract."

It wouldn't be anything that simple. Omi nodded, setting the box to one side. Of course, no known drug could do even half of what Persia claimed had been done to this target's victims, and if there'd been any unknown chemicals in their bodies, it would certainly have been picked up on autopsy… Why drive up a blind alley?

Or another one. Amano was only exactly what he appeared to be, and knew nothing – if, Omi checked himself, he wasn't a very convincing actor, or if Aya simply hadn't been what he looked for in a victim. A young loner was normally a sure bet for a target like this, someone only their family would miss and even they would likely not miss very much—but of course there was no pattern (or none that they could see, which didn't mean there was none). Maybe Amano just hadn't been interested. It could have been that, of course. It could always have been that.

"What's your hunch, Aya-kun? Do you think Amano's hiding anything?"

(And Youji, who had been leaning over Ken's shoulder to read the printouts the boy was still holding in his lap, raised his eyes heavenward in time-honored _oh brother_ mode. "Oh," he murmured parenthetically, "so we're relying on hunches now, well that's just _great_.")

"I think Amano is just a doctor." Aya folded his arms, regarded Omi levelly out of the corner of his eyes. He ignored Youji's theatrics altogether. "He struck me as utterly harmless. Of course, a lot of targets do that, but this one seemed genuine. He's all wrong for this."  
"Which is pretty much what we expected," Omi mused. "Youji-kun, what do you think?"  
Youji shrugged. "From what I heard the guy's just a bit of a kook, and if there were as many murderers as there were middle-aged guys on New Age trips we'd all be in a lotta trouble."  
"Let me guess," Ken said, "you got talking to the receptionist, right?"  
"Guilty as charged, but what else did you expect me to do all morning? Now the other one—" Youji leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on his knees; when Omi looked over at him, his green eyes were unusually alert, "—the _other_ one, Doctor Takagawa? Might mean nothing but Honoka – that's the receptionist – Honoka said she sometimes sees certain patients out of hours, the ones she thinks could benefit from quote-unquote _extra therapy_. She's got an interest in some other clinic way out in the suburbs, so Honoka says. I don't think she likes Takagawa much… Omi, could we run a check on that?"

The clatter of keys was all his answer. Omi had turned back to the computer and slipped unobtrusively back into the clinic records; he was already working, head diligently bowed. Youji-kun, did you really need to ask?

"If she's made a note of the people she refers on," Omi said to his monitor, "then we could cross-check that with the names of the victims, see if there's any correlation. Just let me… yes. Yes, she's noting it."  
"She is?" Youji got to his feet and walked over to the computer, hands in his pockets. "Really? That's pretty sloppy."  
"It's nothing major," Omi said, pointing to the screen; a patient record was displayed there, belonging to something called a Kimiko Yamada, an uninteresting-sounding suburban housewife who had lived a blameless and unremarkable life for forty-seven years, and died because she had walked into the wrong clinic. There was nothing interesting about her notes, either, save the single telltale sentence that had marked her for death. "Look, that's it."

_Referred for further therapy_, Youji read.

That was it. A single naked statement that told them absolutely nothing, save that an unknown woman had been marked for death as off-handedly as she might have been advised to see a chiropractor or start walking more. Cold-blooded, Omi thought, wasn't the word for it. He hit a couple of keys and Kimiko Yamada vanished.

"Masahide Oki," Omi said, "he was a victim. So was Kouji Naka, but he survived. Mitsuko Sato, Yuichi Nagata, Juri Fukuda… they're all victims. There's a few nothing happened to, but all the victims got a referral." Omi stared at the screen, worrying at his lower lip. "Youji-kun, did the receptionist tell you the clinic name?"  
Youji shook his head. "Sorry. I got the impression she hasn't been told it. She wouldn't even know about the appointments if some of the patients hadn't talked."  
"_Damn_," Omi murmured, the obscenity caught and carried almost accidentally on his breath. "We need that clinic name—"  
"What," Ken said unexpectedly, "has school got to do with it?"

The last time Omi had looked in Ken's direction, Ken had been sat on the couch with his blanket caught uncomfortably about him, seemingly deeply absorbed in reading a questionnaire of some sort. Now he raised his head and said, _what's school got to do with it_, and he was looking at them with all expectation that an answer was there for the giving: Omi (Ken-kun, what on earth are you talking about?) gazed back, unable to hide his own bewilderment, and Youji and Aya too – Aya quietly critical as ever, Youji trying very hard to suppress a smirk.

It was impossible to tell for sure when the fever had left his cheeks so flushed already, but Omi could have sworn that Ken had colored awkwardly. Another man in his situation might well have pretended he hadn't spoken, but Ken Hidaka wouldn't have been Ken Hidaka if he hadn't decided the best thing to do in the face of embarrassment was brazen it out.

"_What_?" Ken glared at them from beneath his messy fringe, as if their stares were an accusation, and waved the papers he was holding at the three of them. "It's on this bullshit quiz Youji brought home. You come in with a sore leg and they ask you where you went to school. That's holism? It's _crap_ is what it is." And he made to cast the questionnaire disdainfully aside, only for Aya to pluck it from his fingers. Ken started: just for a second, his eyes went wide. "Aya, what the _Hell_—?"

Aya said nothing; he didn't even look back at Ken. He merely flipped the questionnaire open and quickly skimmed it only to stop short, raising his head slightly, before he had even finished reading the first page. He didn't exactly condescend to look startled but he hesitated all the same, a look stealing into his eyes which wasn't quite confusion, but came close enough to it to touch. A stranger might not have picked up on it; his teammates, attuned as they were to the subtle shifts of expression that marked Aya's moods, would hardly have known how not to.

"He's right," he said, handing the questionnaire to Youji. "There's a question about schooling."  
Ken gave Aya a dirty look. "Did you think I was making it up? Of course there is!"

Once again, Aya didn't reply. Tearing the staple from the sheets and sitting down on the very edge of the couch – Ken gave him an affronted look and shifted a little further away, almost as if he were worried Aya might be contagious – he spread the pages of the questionnaire out across the table, bending over them intent as a student with their finals paper. He glanced up at Youji when the blonde came to stand by his side.

"Where did you get this?" Aya asked.  
"Stole it," Youji said simply. "I took it from the reception desk while the girl was fetching something. I thought they'd both use the same form."  
"The layout's pretty much identical," Aya said. "There's just a couple of extra questions. This one about relatives' health—" he jabbed one slender finger down, dagger-like, at a line of small tick boxes – _do any of your relatives suffer from any of the following conditions?_ – then ran it quickly across the pages, coming to rest beside another section on the first page, "—and this one. Ken's right, it's about education."  
Omi flicked back to the records again. "Huh. I didn't think so… There's nothing about education in her patient notes."  
"Well, there is here. It asks when you stopped," Ken said, and he sounded as confused as he looked. "I don't get it. What the Hell does when you left _school_ have to do with your health? Wasn't there…" He hesitated, his dark eyes uncertain, a frown playing across his lips that, on him, indicated nothing but thought. "You mean there _wasn't_ a question like that on the other guy's? Amano's?"

Almost by accident, Omi – are you thinking what I'm thinking? – met Youji's gaze, and was startled to realize that the young man looked almost as uncomfortable as he was feeling. As Omi watched, Youji wetted his lips, very deliberately, and tucked a hank of pale hair behind one ear: an entirely useless gesture, as it all fell forward again a few seconds later, but one which betrayed his sudden discomfort far more plainly than words ever could have done. Yes, Youji was thinking what he was thinking, and he didn't like it one bit…

Neither of them looked at Ken.

"No," Youji said slowly, "and it doesn't, Ken. It doesn't have anything to do with it. Omi, could you…"

Omi simply nodded. What else could he do?

For a long while there was nothing. Twenty minutes dragged dilatorily past, marked by nothing but the clatter of the keyboard and the click of the mouse, by Youji and Ken talking in furtive, guilty whispers, as Omi sifted through resumes and application forms and old school records. Searching – already knowing what he was going to find. A company president, a gymnast, builders and housewives and a bride-to-be, an aging real-estate broker arrogant and swollen as a dirigible, a scattering of salarymen, a beautician who ran her own salon—and, all of a sudden, the one thing their target's victims had in common was only obvious after all.

"High school," Omi said.  
"What?" Ken blinked, glancing at Youji in consternation. Though he tried and tried hopelessly to hide it, Ken sounded spooked. Omi hardly blamed him. "What do you mean, _high school_? What's that got to do with this?"  
"That's the connection, Ken-kun," Omi said, his voice low and hushed as a child talking during Prayers. "That's how she's choosing. None of her victims went to high school."

* * *

Which was why Ken Hidaka was in a lousy mood.

The fever hardly helped, of course. Nor did the stuffed-up head or the exhaustion or the dull aches in his limbs he wouldn't have minded if he'd only done anything to earn them. He felt dazed, dizzy, and when he walked the ground yawed beneath him like the deck of a ship: it was like being drunk, just without the fun. As if that wasn't bad enough he'd been blowing his nose too often and now it hurt. At least you won't have to fake sick, Omi had told him, as if it were some kind of a blessing…

"What do you want me to do," he demanded, "walk into this woman's office, say 'Hi, I'm stupid' and wait to have a stroke?"  
And Youji just looked at him in that infuriating way he had when he thought Ken was being too dim-witted for words, and all he said was, "Have you got a better idea?"

Ken hadn't had one of those. Nobody had. And so Youji had led him off and driven him away, and left him stranded in the waiting room of Thousand Leaves Clinic clutching a handful of tissues, and shivering despite the heavy sweater he was wearing. Vindictively, Ken had told the secretary to clerk him in as Ayato Kudou, which had made him feel a little better for about thirty seconds; being handed Takagawa's questionnaire, with its ominous little additions, and politely asked to fill it out and don't worry, Kudou-san, it's all totally confidential, had very quickly left him feeling a lot worse. Ken faked a family history of heart failure, and wished he could go back to bed. He wished he'd been well so he could have hit Youji.

He coughed into the tissues and tried to ignore the pointed glances he received from the few other people sat in the clinic waiting area with him; a young woman, who looked impossibly slim and beautiful to be the mother of the small girl sat next to her, hustled her daughter a few seats away from him. The child's face was covered in small red sores that made Ken feel itchy just to look at them. Bored, the girl swung her legs, and pulled a face at him; she seemed frankly stunned when he returned the compliment.

"Kudou-san," said the receptionist, "The doctor will see you now."

Doctor Takagawa started when the door opened. She dropped her pen, and scrambled to her feet as Ken walked into the consulting room, giving him a wide, sunshiny smile that struck him as almost as false as her scatterbrained act did.

Up close, Ken could see why Youji had called her _Miss Venice Beach_. She was pretty, in the scrubbed and sanitized way some American girls had that spoke of sisterly kisses and brisk, hygienic sex, and supple and willow-slender and a clear four inches taller than Ken which left him, as it always did, feeling small and stupid and several years too young. She looked like an actress chosen only for her looks, who'd been woefully miscast as a doctor: she might have stepped into the clinic straight from a Hollywood backlot. The only thing missing was the smart-girl glasses she'd abandon twenty minutes into the first act. Doctors didn't look like her, not this side of the cinema screen…

Elizabeth Takagawa was young and sweet-faced and she dimpled charmingly when she smiled, her fingers brushing lightly against his own as she took the questionnaire from him, but she wasn't scatty at all and a pretty potential serial killer was still a potential serial killer. Ken really didn't appreciate the thought of being stuck in an office with her. He wished Youji could at least have stayed in the waiting-room.

"She's not doing anything in there," Youji had told him, "and she's not _going_ to do anything, not in the middle of her boss's consulting rooms. For God's sake, Ken, I was only _there_ yesterday. You think she wouldn't get suspicious?"

Of course, Ken had understood why Youji couldn't stay with him; that receptionist of his would certainly have remembered him, even if nobody else had done so. That didn't make Ken feel any happier when the door to Takagawa's consulting room clicked to behind him, and she politely ordered him to sit. Make yourself comfortable, the doctor said, but the chair she gestured to was made of hard plastic with a mean little cushion set into the seat, and the harsh morning sunlight slanting in through the overlarge windows left the room dazzling and washed-out as a room in an over-exposed photograph, and he hadn't been to high school and this woman was going to try and kill him.

She wasn't going to manage, of course, but she was still going to try. Ken wished he was at home.

But for now, all Takagawa was doing was smiling – settling herself back in her chair, and smoothing her tight black skirt. Somehow, it was almost worse.

"Good morning," she said formally: she had the precise, pedantic diction of someone speaking a language they'd learned too late, and spoke with an audible twang. "My name is Liza Takagawa, I'm the doctor in charge of your case here at Thousand Leaves. What appears to be the problem, Mr. Kudou?"  
"I'm sick," Ken said: as if it wasn't obvious what was wrong with him just from looking at him! "I've got flu, or something."  
"Ah, of course. Would you mind if I took a look through your questionnaire?"  
"Fine by me," Ken said, and folded his arms across his chest as if he were cold. He _was_ cold, and he shivered, and essayed a longing glance at the examining couch in the corner of the room. If only he could go and lie down on it. Just for a minute. He wouldn't fall asleep, he just wanted to _lie down_…

Instead, Ken watched Takagawa frowning slightly as she flicked through the questionnaire, left to right: he wondered why she was frowning. He wondered if it was because of his half-assed attempts to answer the questions, or because of his handwriting, or if it was simply because he was Japanese, and wrote in it. He fancied she hesitated at his so-called familial tendency to circulatory disease; she smiled over the front page, and her smile was a small, darting thing, like a mouse skittering across floorboards. Ken wouldn't even have noticed it if he hadn't been looking out for it. She picked up a pen, and made a couple of small notes on the cover. _Referred for further therapy?_

Perhaps. But she would at least put up a pretense of conducting a consultation first. She took his temperature, shone a small light into his ears, pressed a stethoscope, its metal head uncomfortably cool as ever, to his chest – Ken could have been four years old again, sat blinking in his underwear on the side of an exam couch while his mother nodded in a straight-backed chair. Be a good boy, she had said.

Finally Takagawa nodded, tucking away the stethoscope, and giving him another too-wide sham of a smile. "Perhaps you could tell me a bit about your symptoms. When did all this start?"

"Tuesday," Ken said. "I went to bed Monday night feeling fine and I woke up like this." He sniffed and rubbed at his nose and caught Doctor Takagawa looking at him strangely. Just for a second, she had looked appalled.  
"Feeling like…?"  
"I've got flu," Ken said again, and the words seemed to stick in his sandpaper-scratchy throat and he coughed, and it brought him no relief. Do I need to draw you a picture? "My head hurts and my throat's sore and I feel really achy, and I'm cold." And I want to go to sleep and I really, _really_ wish I wasn't here.  
"Bryonia alba, maybe," Takagawa murmured, so quietly Ken could tell he hadn't been meant to hear. Then, out loud, "Could you tell me a little more? Your cough, for example – could you start by telling me a bit more about that?"  
Ken blinked at her. "What about my cough?"  
"How it feels," Takagawa explained. "It sounds painful. Does it hurt?"

Yes, he said, his cough was painful. It was dry, nonproductive, it hurt when he swallowed, he would want to sneeze and be unable to. And then she had asked, what time of day is it worse at? It's just there, Ken had said, and Takagawa told him that she understood that, but would he say it was worse at ten in the morning, or ten at night? She asked, do you find that anything brings your coughing on – does a particular food affect it? Tea? Coffee? What about chocolate? Stretching? Writing? No? Well then, what about emotion… surprise, or shock, or sadness? Do you find that affects your symptoms at all? Do you, Takagawa asked delicately, ever find that your cough is worse after sex?

"After _sex_? It's a cold."  
"So it's not worse after sex."  
"I don't _want_ to have sex, I've got a cold!"

And your head? she inquired. Do you have a headache? And like an idiot Ken had said, _well, yes_, and the entire stupid process had started again. Ken could hardly have felt more uncomfortable if Takagawa had shone her desk lamp in his eyes. What causes your headaches, Kudou-san? Is it company? Well, yes, if it's yours. Yeah, I've got a headache. I got it from being dragged all the way to fucking Sumida-ku and asked a load of idiot questions by an insane bitch who thought it was open season on anyone who didn't have a high school diploma.

He didn't say it. (Be good when we're at the doctor's, Ken. He's just trying to help you…)

I tried, mother. I tried to be good – but the gentle cross-examination about his fever had been more than he could take. Ken was exhausted, he was aching and his throat hurt from talking, he was sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair bundled up in an oversized sweater, his hands resting on his forearms as if it were mid-winter and he were trapped in the snow – fuck, Ken thought, she took my temperature and I'm sitting here shivering, what more does she want?

"Oh for Christ's sakes!" Ken snapped. "I've just got _flu_! I went out in the rain and I got sick, that's it! Are you going to give me anything for it or aren't you?"

Takagawa shot him a single sharp glance, her full, shell-pink lips briefly twisting into a disapproving frown – you _stupid_ boy, if all you want is someone to dish out drugs then go to a pharmacist and _stop wasting my_ – and then nothing. She had caught herself, carefully schooling an expression of professional concern back across her face.

(And, though that look alarmed him, it was exactly what Ken had been aiming for. Make her angry: this was the plan. Lead her on, draw her out, make her think the world would be better off without another dull-witted, mean-tempered young man who meant nothing much to anybody, who would only go on to hurt himself, or someone else. Let her think she'd be doing the city a favor. Let her assume what she likes, just as long as it leaves her wishing you dead. He hated Doctor Takagawa, she left him cold and fearful: inside Ken wanted to cheer.)

"Very well," she said finally – and there was resentment trapped in her voice, for all it was balked and furtive, or was it just his imagination? "If you'd rather we stopped here, we can. I've enough information to work with, though I'd be able to prescribe more precisely if you'd only let me continue…"  
"I'll take my chances," Ken said, and his voice sounded smoke-cured; he was hoarse as a lifelong chain-smoker. Something tickled at the back of his throat, and he wondered if he was going to start coughing again.  
Takagawa placed one hand to her lips. "Oh, I do apologize. I've made you talk too much… would you like a glass of water?"  
"No!" Ken said far too quickly. "I mean… you don't have to worry. I'll be fine."

(And of course there's nothing in the water, Ken… but do you want to take the chance you're wrong?)

All she said was, "If you're sure. Anyway, I'm going to start you on belladonna, from what you've told me of your symptoms it should have an effect. If that doesn't work feel free to call in for a follow-up, we can always try a different route when you're feeling less hoarse. And – please forgive me if this sounds strange, Mr. Kudou – I think," Takagawa said carefully, "that you might benefit from massage therapy."

_Got you._ She gave him a narrow, appraising look, up and under from behind a fall of strawberry-blonde hair, and it was all Ken could do not to laugh in her face. Massage therapy. _Christ_! Does she think I'm going to be _that_ easy? Really? It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, _just how stupid do you think I am?_ but he bit it back. He had to.

(You think all you have to do is hint that you might let me fuck you, and I'll come running.)

It was an ugly and unpleasant thought, saying nothing at all positive about either of them, and Ken was thoroughly ashamed of it – but Doctor Elizabeth Takagawa was a very ugly woman.

"_Massage_ therapy? Really?"

Ken tried to keep his face impassive and his voice neutral, but he always did have indiscreet eyes – they were too wide, and far too expressive. Something of his confusion must have shown there, for she smiled. Smiled, and her smile was bright and playful and bluntly suggestive, but contained the same note of utter fraudulence that had been there from the minute he stepped into the room. You're coming onto me, he thought, and you don't even like me, because you think that's the kind of guy I am. Because you think that's all you have to do to keep me hooked.

"Certainly. I think your illness might be stress-related, and I'm sure you're aware that massage is very good for relaxation. Now, I know this is very short notice but I'm going to need to ask you to come to the Hahnemann Institute of Natural Therapy tomorrow evening… can you make that? I," she said, and Ken couldn't help noticing she hadn't even given him a chance to tell her no – actually, Doctor, I have soccer practice – "run a clinic there after hours."

And she was reaching for an appointment card and a pen, a simple black ballpoint. _8:30 PM, Hahnemann Institute_, she wrote in Roman letters, and then an address in Nerima and, how weird, there was something sly and furtive about it, and it really did feel as if they were making an assignation.

I'll see you there, Takagawa said, and grinned, giving him a brief, predatory flash of her eye-teeth.

Ken could hardly claim he hadn't been warned.


	3. Like Cures Like

Five fifty on a Friday night and the sky beginning to bruise and the windows spattered with the first heavy drops of rain, and the four members of Weiss in the kitchen and out of place there, all dark clothes and balked tension. Anxiety waited patiently on them, an uninvited guest nobody could work up the nerve to force to leave. The wait was always the worst part – and, afterwards, that would be the worst part too. Alone with one another and the simple fact of a mission, there was no way Aya could pretend his companions were anything but what they were: he didn't care to lie to himself at the best of times, and he certainly didn't now. These men were simply his teammates, and they had come together only to kill.

Youji's long black duster lay draped far too casually across the back of the couch its owner lay sprawled upon, idly smoking; Ken, flushed and weary-looking, fidgeted with the release mechanism of his bugnuks, the claws slipping out of their housing with a flex of the boy's fist, then back as he let his fingers fall open again. The soft, metallic _hiss_ and _snick_ was jarring.

Aya wished he wouldn't do that.

Aya wished he knew who Ken was, and what he thought he was doing there. By rights, they never should have met.

Across the room, Omi sat at the kitchen table with a screwdriver poised between his slender fingers, changing the batteries in a comm. unit. Aya couldn't watch him work, he'd had to turn away. He couldn't stand watching the delicate fluttering of the boy's hands, the way he fussed so painstakingly over the tiny components. _I'm sure they'd last out tonight_, he had said, _but_—

(—but none of us have lived this long by taking unnecessary risks.)

"If she's really pushing thirty," Ken said into the silence, "then I'm Namie Amuro."  
"If she's really called _Elizabeth_," Youji said, effortlessly raising him, "I'm Philip Marlowe." He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray in a single, decisive motion, then immediately lit another. (Chain-smoking; the single nervous habit Youji didn't like to admit he had.) "Come on, Kenken, the woman's a genuine fake. Of course she's lying about her age."

_Doctor Elizabeth Takagawa_, said the Thousand Leaves Clinic homepage, _is a graduate of_ _Ashwood University__, __California_ –the university had turned out to be as fake as her doctorate. It offered no classes, it had no faculty, it would certify absolutely anyone – provided they could pay. Fifteen minutes online and Omi had found the university homepage: another half hour and six hundred dollars and, he said, he could have become a doctor, too.

Keisuke Amano – Aya had known it from the start – knew nothing; he was Takagawa's pawn and nothing more, lending her respectability by association, handing her victims on a plate. She had faked her own life the better to use him, and now she was using his patients to… what?

"Not just that," Omi said, placing his screwdriver down and turning in his chair to gaze gravely at his teammates. "I looked into the records. We were right, Aya-kun. The Hahnemann Institute _is_ a sham."

Tucking the newly-repaired comm. unit into his jacket pocket, Omi unrolled a set of architect's blueprints, weighing down one corner with a half-empty coffee mug. The blueprints, of course, they had all seen before. They were scored with highlighted bands indicating possible weaknesses (the back door, a single side window tucked discreetly away from the curious gazes of the neighbors, a skylight set into the sloping roof of what looked like it had once been a treatment room) and the bold strokes of a thick black marker showing proposed entrance and exit routes.

"This," Omi said, slapping one gloved hand down hard onto the blueprints, "isn't the Hahnemann Institute. The Hahnemann Institute doesn't exist."  
Ken blinked at him. "Doesn't exist? What's this we're going to, then?"  
"According to tax records, it's Three Pines Surgery," Omi said. "Or it _was_ Three Pines Surgery, before Doctor Maeda left."

Nobody quite knew why Doctor Maeda had left. He simply hadn't opened up his surgery one day and then again the next. There'd been a tax investigation pending, and if rumor could be believed he'd been fiddling his books for years. Probably the threat of a through investigation of his accounting practices had been enough to have him panic and skip town with the takings… Whatever the reason was he had gone, leaving his surgery shuttered and bolted, his equipment walled up inside –and leaving Liza Takagawa with an opening.

Target confirmed.

* * *

From the front, the Hahnemann Institute of Natural Therapy looked much the same as it must have done in the venerable Doctor Maeda's day, before he was done in by his not-so-venerable bookkeeping practices. The grass in the front yard was slightly overlong, the paintwork about the windowframes could have done with touching up; it was a patched-up overcoat of a place, shabby and fraying slightly about the edges but that, for a small clinic in a not exactly over-prosperous neighborhood, was hardly remarkable. Only the name plate by the door looked new.

It was a nothing of a place. Just another shabby little concern, hoping to make up for its gently disintegrating offices and unimpressive locale with a farcically pretentious name. It looked like so many other small suburban businesses. It looked legitimate, or close enough to it to pass.

The most striking thing about the surgery was that Weiss were watching it. Youji and Ken from across the road, hidden in the convenient patch of shadow cast by an apartment building's overhang; the others strayed closer. Aya, a patient shadow, loitered discreetly by the vulnerable back door while Omi perched precariously on the roof. A cool evening with just a hint of a breeze and the skylight he crouched by creaked and rattled in a manner that would have done any haunted house proud, the glass loose in a rotting frame: it would be the work of a minute for the boy to force it open and slip quietly inside, it would take seconds for him to kick out the frame, now you see me now you don't, and drop down in a clatter of falling glass to chase down the target, should she decide to run rather than stand…

There was, they had decided, no harm in Ken going in through the front. Takagawa knew _he_ was coming. The target, Omi had said, would probably be more suspicious if she _didn't_ hear someone come in the front doors than if she did.

And Youji likewise. (We don't know what she's planning; we just know she wants him dead. Why take chances?)

Massage therapy, she'd called it: Ken had blushed when he admitted that was what Takagawa had offered him, muttered it sulkily and scowled like a schoolboy when Youji had laughed. Probably they weren't all offered that. That, Youji thought, would be a lure for the men. The gymnast could have been offered chiropractic, the older women aromatherapy or crystal healing or flower remedies or anything at all. It wasn't like she'd actually have to deliver on her promises, so why did it matter what she told them, as long as it got them through the door?

God knew what she was doing to them when she got them in there, or how she managed to do it, but it was sounding to Youji like it would involve some degree of… call it _laying on of hands_. But how could her touch cause cancers, or strokes—?

"Target sighted."

The buzz of the carrier signal cut across his thoughts (absurd thoughts anyway, far better let them go), and then there was Omi's voice – loud and clear as if the boy had been stood behind him, and leaned forward to speak in his ear. By the time Takagawa drove her nondescript little town car up to the clinic doors and slid it, with pointless precision, neatly into one of the marked bays, Weiss were watching for her.

The engine cut off, Doctor Takagawa gracefully unfolded herself from the front seat – and from across a clinic car park, the tarmac cracked and scored with springing clumps of weeds, Youji got his first view of Miss Venice Beach. She moved like a model, hips swaying, head held proudly erect, her long, straight hair, burnished by the glow of the streetlights, swinging across her shoulders with every step, back and forth like the hand of a metronome. Yes, she was very much like a model and yet, despite her poise, despite her grace and elegance, there was still something of the girl about her.

She didn't look like any kind of doctor to Youji.

She didn't (Ken was right) look like she was pushing thirty, either. She can't be, Youji thought. She's _my age_—

"That's a go, Omi," Youji murmured, keying his own comm. It was all he could do to suppress a long, low, admiring whistle. "I got her. Will you look at _that_." Over the comm., he thought he heard Omi sigh, and he smirked. Really, the kid should have been grateful. At least this way Omi could be sure he was actually paying attention…  
"Will you give it up for five minutes?" Ken hissed; no need for the comm. this time. Ken truly _was_ behind him, and he proved it by giving Youji a painful jab in the ribs with one finger. "She's a _target_, for Chrissake!"  
"Yeah," Youji admitted with a sigh, "I know. Still a nice view, though."

Takagawa paused in the entryway, fidgeting briefly with her handbag; the faint clatter of keys and she was pushing open the surgery door, vanishing into the darkened building. The door swung to behind her, creaking slightly on poorly-oiled hinges. A gap of perhaps five seconds and the lights snapped on sudden and startling, blazing in the windows of the waiting-room and the entryway, in a small room that might have been an office or a treatment room or anything at all. Light like a trail, marking her progress through the empty building. _And action_.

She hadn't, Youji noted, made the mistake of only switching on the lights she needed and leaving the rest of the building to languish in suspicious shadow. Smart move. No stranger, walking past now, would have guessed that the surgery had sprung to life bare minutes earlier. Takagawa's victims wouldn't have known. Ken wouldn't have, if he hadn't been watching already, if he had been only what he appeared to be…

"Could we have radio silence, please?" Omi spoke quietly but Youji knew it for an order, and as close to a rebuke as the teenager was going to get.

And then there was nothing at all, just the glow of the lights, the sound of traffic on the main road. Ten past eight on a Friday and there were so many other things he could have been doing with a night like this – a night which was cool but not cold, the sky hung about with clouds, powder-pink and fluffy as the cotton-wool balls on a kindergartner's collage. The leaves of the bushes and the sleek hides of cars were glazed with droplets of water, the sidewalk glistened after a short, sharp shock of a shower, and the air was heavy with the clean, heady smell that follows the rain.

There was potential in a night like this. And here he was stuck outside an old surgery with a dazed and shivering Ken Hidaka (and the boy, leaning heavily against the wall, was coughing again, his head lowered and shoulders shaking), with nothing to do but watch the doors and wait for Omi to give the word. _Brother_.

Takagawa's shadow flitted past one of the downstairs windows.

"What," Ken murmured, and his voice was quiet and so hoarse that Youji had to strain to hear, "d'you think she's doing?"  
"No idea," Youji said, wrapping one gloved hand over the headset of his comm. "Getting ready, I guess…" Glancing back over the curve of one banked shoulder, he thought he saw Ken swallow slightly; it might just have been his cold. Ken didn't look nervous, he'd give the kid that much. Youji wondered what he was thinking.  
All the boy said was, "Reckon she's alone?"  
"Can't see any sign of anyone else, so most likely…"

It wasn't what Ken had wanted to ask. He didn't look anxious, but his face was a betrayal all the same. Ken was frowning, Youji could tell by the way the shadows fell across the planes and lines of his face – brows drawn sharply downward, lips slightly pursed – and by the look in his indiscreet eyes. How does she kill them, Youji? What do you think she _does_?

(Are we all going to die?)

"Mission commencing," Omi said, to none of them and to all of them at once. "Move in."

Youji – tugging off his comm. and pocketing it, for what would Takagawa think if tonight's intended prey showed up with a man wearing a radio headset? – gave Ken a quick, confirmatory nod he hadn't actually needed, then slipped from the shadows and down the clinic path, moving quiet and subtle as smoke. Ken pushed past him when they reached the entrance, ducking through and, in a gesture of courtesy rendered bizarre by context, holding the door open for Youji, too.

Takagawa would find out he was there soon enough, but why spoil the surprise? Youji gave Ken a reassuring smile (and Ken, of course, hadn't needed that, either) and followed him in.

What was inside was normality, or a very close approximation but, though the general impression was one of ordered tedium, the details were jarringly off. The waiting-room chairs looked uncomfortable, their cushions lumpy and sagging, and the shaggy dracaena lurking in the corner ran rampant, and riotously, comically so. The stack of Health and Beauty magazines scattered across the small side table were perhaps a bit too new and looked almost untouched, as if they were there more because doctors' waiting-rooms always had magazines than because anyone had ever had much call to sit down and read them. Even the air, stale and thrice-used and tainted with dust, and the sweetish scents of damp and rot, was wrong.

It was another front, though it wasn't a particularly good one. Youji could almost have owned himself disappointed.

"Gloves," he whispered, glancing down at Ken's hands.  
"Oh, thanks." Ken quickly tugged off his gauntlets and shoved them in one of his jacket pockets. He took off his goggles, too, shaking his head so his hair fell more naturally. "Um, you should probably do the same. And take off your coat. Or open it, or something."

So you don't, the implication went, look so much like a bad-ass assassin, and he was probably right about that. Youji shrugged off his coat, draping it over one arm. If Takagawa asked, he'd say he was going on to a club.

Aside from the pair of them, the waiting-room was empty. The reception desk stood vacant; there was no sign of the target. Ken wandered over to the desk, burdened with stacks of paperwork and an old computer, large and lumpish, that had probably been shut up with the surgery when Doctor Maeda ran off. Out of hours, said a new-looking sign, hand-printed in a foreigner's too-precise _kanji_, please ring and wait for attention. Next to it lurked a small brass bell, like something lifted from a hotel lobby.

Ken rung it, mindful of prints, with one elbow, then went to lean on the counter. That, the look in his eyes and the guilty, half-furtive expression on his face asked, was right, wasn't it?

A door banged somewhere down the corridor and Takagawa bustled in, an unbuttoned white coat hastily thrown over her street clothes. She did a double-take when she saw Youji there, an uncertain expression flickering briefly across her even features: it was here and gone in a second, and if Youji hadn't been looking out for it he might almost have told himself he had imagined it.

"Kudou-san," she said, and Youji started slightly, only to realize Takagawa was looking not at him, but at Ken. He'd told this woman his name was _Kudou_? Couldn't the kid have chosen a better cover? "I'm so glad you could make it on such short notice." Yeah, Youji thought, I bet you are. "How are you feeling this evening?"  
Ken raised his head, gave her an uncertain smile that didn't quite work right. "About the same," he said. "I didn't sleep well last night."  
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, you'll probably find you sleep a lot better tonight, and you'll be able to lie down when we get inside, of course." Takagawa gave Ken a small, playful smile that to Youji's eyes had looked almost flirtatious; out of the corner of his eyes, he thought he saw Ken color, and bridle slightly. She thought she was being charming. She didn't seem to realize it was repelling him. "I'll consider myself forewarned if you drop off on the table."  
"Does that happen a lot?" Ken asked, making a brave attempt to sound curious.  
"It can do. So," Takagawa said with a games-mistress's ghastly sham jollity, "shall we get started, then?"  
Youji wouldn't have noticed how nervous she sounded, either, if he hadn't been listening for that, too

As she turned to show Ken down the hall Takagawa – _I thought I told him to come alone!_ – gave Youji a strange look. She saw, in his presence, a pet project subtly undermined, and she couldn't quite keep the frown from her face: he, as if oblivious to anything but the simple fact that here was a pretty young woman looking intently at him, smiled back at her. She seemed to be on the verge of demanding he tell her his name, and what he thought he was doing here.

But what Takagawa said was, "Will you be wanting to stay with him?"  
"Well, there's nothing else to do round here," Youji said with a shrug, "and he's gotta get back somehow."  
"I see. Well, if you'd like to follow me, I'm sure we can find something to do with you."

(And yes, Youji thought, that probably _had_ been supposed to sound sinister. I know what you're thinking, Miss Venice Beach. You're thinking, this could mean trouble. You're thinking, I can't let him walk out of here. You're thinking, I'm going to have to kill the other one, too…

(Too bad you're going to have to change your plans.)

There was no nameplate on the consulting-room door, though Youji could see the scars of screws marking the place where one must have been before. Takagawa opened the door, stepped back to usher them in – beside him, he felt Ken tense, and he placed a hand on the boy's forearm – to reassure? To restrain? Ken turned and made to move and then she was slamming the door behind them, far too loud and far too fast. A key scraped in the lock. Elizabeth Takagawa was smiling.

There was no point pretending any more. This was where the cover ended; this was what had been behind it all along and there must, Youji thought pointlessly, have been another room somewhere, an actual treatment room, where she would have seen the people she decided to let live…

This wasn't that room. It was sunk into crepuscular shadow, illuminated only by the light falling through the wide, curtain-less windows and a single desk lamp resting on the floor in one corner and it might as well not have bothered, there was so little to see. The walls were bare, the paint cracked and flaking and stained here and there with streaks of rot, the floor smeared with dust and scattered with chunks of fallen plaster. The air reeked of decay and of illness, and spent fear. The room (so what does she _do_ to them? What does she use?) was empty, empty as a stage after the sets are struck and the actors have left – it held nothing save for a single straight-backed chair with a hard little backrest and a cushioned seat bleeding stuffing, and an old leather-and-steel examining couch set just off-center.

"What the _Hell_?" Ken demanded. "What do you think you're—!"  
Takagawa's smile didn't falter for an instant. "I'm going to need you to lie down…"

And then there was Omi, too.

Omi. The boy had been tracking Ken from the roof, watching and waiting for Takagawa to make her move. Now, hearing Ken's voice, then Takagawa's, watching him, as a point of light on the screen of his laptop, walk into a room a matter of feet away and stop there, Omi would have made his own. He slipped through the invitingly gaping skylight, landing with a heavy thump in a sudden, startling skitter of loose masonry – wood and small pebbles and a flurry of plaster dust. Another thump and something fell to the floor in a tinkling discord of breaking glass and Omi was slamming open the treatment-room door, a dart poised between his gloved fingers.

"Takagawa!"

The woman started, her head snapping up, painted lips falling open into a perfect O of surprise. Too startled to think of fury, or of fear or dismay, she half-turned to face the source of the sound, a look of confusion spreading across her face as she realized she had been interrupted by a child.

And then she was falling, a neurotoxin-tipped dart sticking from the back of her neck.

Youji relaxed. Slipping back into his coat, tugging on his gloves, he walked over to Takagawa's fallen body and lifted the keys from her coat pocket, unlocking the consulting-room door and letting in Aya. Aya, katana drawn, stepped inside, a disdainful look on his face as he glanced about himself at the stained walls, the single lamp, the examining couch. Yeah, Youji wanted to say, I know, goddamn targets and their theatrics. He didn't say it, though. Irreverent though he may have been, it just felt wrong to joke about these people after the fact, in front of their still-warm corpses.

Takagawa lay face-down on the floor, one high-heeled shoe half-off, her corn-silk hair spilling over her face. Her eyes were staring, her manicured hands clutching uselessly at her throat. She had forgotten how to breathe and drowned in air: a far quicker and more merciful end than many of her victims had been granted.

"I wonder how she did it," Ken said, "after all that?" All his attention was on his hands as he put his own gloves, too big and, with the weapon, too cumbersome to be carried comfortably in his pockets, back on. "She's got no kit in here. You reckon it _was_ a drug, after all?"  
Omi shrugged. "Probably something like that, Ken-kun. Guess we'll never know now."

He couldn't see how it mattered, as long as she was finished – a target was a target was a target and that was all there was to say. Already Omi was turning to leave, stepping neatly around the woman's fallen body and crossing to Aya at the door. Youji, hesitating to light a quick cigarette and snatch a glimpse at his watch, followed, hands tucked deep into the pockets of his pants as he drifted over to join them. Not yet quarter to nine. A shower and a quick change later and maybe he _would_ get to make something of tonight, after all—

"_Christ_!"

Ken.

Ken – and who could explain why he had done it? Probably even Ken couldn't have told them that – was staring back into the body of the room over one banked shoulder, his eyes wide and his lips slightly parted. Caught on Ken's shout, Youji turned to him, the others turned to him and it was on the tip of Youji's tongue to say, _what's wrong?_ but the words died unspoken. It was only too obvious what had unsettled him.

Doctor Takagawa was getting to her feet.

Ken crossed himself. "Mary Mother of God."  
And what, Youji wondered, did that have to do with it? The cigarette tumbled from suddenly slack fingers. "I thought that dart was tipped!" he heard himself shouting – only to meet Omi's gaze, and stop short. The boy was staring at Takagawa, his blue eyes wide and frightened.  
"But it was," Omi was saying softly. "It _was_ tipped, Youji-kun. It _was_ tipped…"

But she was still alive. For fuck's sakes, Omi, Youji thought, screw your pride! it can't have been tipped, not properly, not if she's getting up! It _can't_ have been! Takagawa stood – a little unsteadily, but she was standing. It was a lot more than anyone else had managed after getting hit with one of Omi's tipped darts. As they watched, she reached behind herself, tugged the dart from the back of her neck and, wincing slightly, cast it to the floor where it rolled into one of the corners. She straightened, brushing her hair from her face, and frowned in vexation.

"Oh," she said in an utterly normal voice, "you're still here."

Ken didn't think about it: he simply moved. The dart hadn't worked, so maybe this would – shaking off surprise easy as a dog shook water from its coat he ran for Takagawa, a soft _snick _telling a tale of blades unleashed from their housing. She started, stumbling backward on her impractical shoes, raising her arms to protect her eyes from the bared claws of Ken's bugnuks: Takagawa cried out, staggering, as the blades ripped fabric and lacerated flesh, tearing through the soft, vulnerable skin of her forearms and laying them open.

Already she was finished. Blood spattered across Ken's cheek, down the side of his jaw, and he pressed forward. Pressing his advantage. She was frightened, she was bleeding out already: another single thrust, under the ribs and up, and it would be over. The claws clicked back into place – and Takagawa placed one bloodied hand on the side of his throat, slender fingers grazing against the skin. He flinched.

He fell.

She touched his shoulder gentle as a lover, her fingers leaving a trail of blood smeared across the side of his throat, and Ken had stiffened, his head snapping back, his muscles tensed; it was almost as if he had suffered an electric shock. For a single sickening moment he had simply stood there, frozen, Takagawa's hand resting on his shoulder – then Ken collapsed like a string-cut puppet, legs giving way as he slumped to the floor, striking the back of his head hard against the scuffed linoleum. Eyes closed, lips parted, he lay at Takagawa's feet, unmoving…

And that's how she did it, Ken. God knew how, or why, but this woman could turn people's own bodies against them.

Omi screamed. "_Ken_-kun!"

He sounded terrified. It was only instinct that had him tear another dart from its housing, fling it blindly at Takagawa: get away from Ken. Get away from him! This time, Takagawa didn't fall. She didn't even react. The woman merely winced as the dart struck her in the shoulder, pulling it out and throwing it to the ground. It might as well have been a child's toy. Her pale eyes full of hard contempt, she gazed levelly at them for a long, suspended moment. Did you really think this was going to be that easy? A minute could have passed like this, or it could have been as many as five, before Takagawa moved again

_Nobody move_ – she didn't have to say it. Dropping to her knees, Takagawa rested one slender, delicate hand on Ken's chest, just above the heart.

"Back off," she said conversationally.

It was only then that Youji realized Ken was still alive.

"I could kill him," Takagawa said into the sudden, heavy silence. "I could stop his heart just by thinking about it. Don't make me prove it."

Youji said nothing. Aya said nothing, though his hands tightened almost imperceptibly about the hilt of his katana – the slight shift of stance, the slight furrowing of the brow were enough to give it away. Omi, however, Youji could almost see relax. If Ken was still alive then the situation was salvageable. There would have to be a way to get him away from her. There would be a way, and Omi would find it. What else could he do?

Takagawa raised her head, her hair falling from her eyes and her right hand resting, palm-down, on Ken's chest as if it had merely fallen there by accident, and she would lift it away the minute she realized that was where it was. It was a lie. One wrong move, Youji knew, and Ken was a dead man.

"You don't want to kill me," Takagawa said. She sounded sly, insinuating; she was a weasel with an egg in its mouth, held at bay in the corner of a barn. How absurd she looked, crouched on the floor with her hair in her face, trying to bargain with them over the unconscious body of their teammate. "You can't kill me. I'll just heal…" And it must have been natural for her, easy as blinking. "I'll spare him, if you let me go. I had to do it, it had to be tried, a power like mine can't be left to waste but I can't do it without learning how, I have to learn how. You've got to understand I'm trying to help. I'm just trying to learn how to _fix_ things."

Youji couldn't help himself. He asked, fix things? What did she mean by that?

She told them. Ever since she was a child, Takagawa said, she'd been able to make people ill. All she had to do was touch them, and they would get sick. It had started small at first. Colds. Sprains. The occasional cut. Little things. Nothing anybody really minded, things that would have happened anyway… but, as she got older, things got worse. Some of the people she had been angry with had been so sick they died, and she'd tried to make them better, but she couldn't. She couldn't cure. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't heal anybody but herself. Not yet. No, not yet, but maybe someday—

(She would murder a few for the sake of saving many. If a handful of little lives were lost now, that was a pity – but wouldn't their involuntary sacrifice be worth it, if it saved so many others? And oh, God, the worst thing about it was Youji had heard it all before, and it hadn't even been from a target…)

"You've got to understand. It's all worth it! I could cure anything," she said, and her voice was full of pride, and it made Youji feel nauseated. "Anything at all. All I have to do is learn how and I can't learn if I don't practice. I can heal myself, you all saw it! Imagine what it would be like if I could do that to anyone who needed it! Imagine how I could—"

Takagawa must have taken her eyes off Omi. Just for a second, but it had been all the boy had needed. Snatching another dart from the case at his waist, he threw it clean into her left eye.

She screamed, her blood-smeared hands flying to her face and, screaming, she fell backward, blood and serous fluid, clear and sticky, seeping through her fingers and coursing down her cheek. Landed heavily on the floor, hands still to her face, but she was already trying to move again, struggling to push herself up. Back on her knees, hands held defensively before her face, Takagawa whimpered as she tugged gently at the dart with one hand, slick and sticky fingers slipping from the metal barrel as she tried to pull the point from her eye.

Omi was running, pushing between Youji and Aya and toward Ken, catching him beneath the arms and dragging him back toward the door. Ken hung in his arms heavy as a corpse, his head falling backward, the gentle stirring of his breath just barely ghosting against Omi's chest. Youji moved to him, snatching for the collar of Ken's jacket, felt the boy's hair spilling, soft and ticklish, against his bare wrist.

"I've got this!" Omi shouted, catching him in the ribs with one elbow. "Just _go_, Youji-kun!"

Get her while she's down.

Youji didn't need to be told twice. He moved, fingers snatching for his watch and fumbling with clumsy fingers for the catch that sprung the release – and the bloodied dart clanged against the floor, rolling off beneath the couch. Too late, Kudou! You really thought this was going to be easy? Once again Takagawa scrambled to her feet, blinking once, twice, wiping at her blood-spattered cheek with one hand; she must have heard him move because she turned her head toward him, blinking again as if she were having trouble clearing her—

_Blind spot_, Youji thought. She couldn't heal everything, after all!

Got you. He darted forward, past Omi – the boy dropping to his knees by the doorway with Ken lying heavy in his arms – and toward the treatment-room door, feet scuffing slightly on the littered floor. Saw Takagawa following the sound, turning to try and look at him; she turned too late. The woman would have seen only the graceful arc of Youji's arm, and the briefest flash of light gleaming on fine metal. She gasped, and half-turned, and made to run.

Already it was too late for that. The harigane caught Takagawa about the arms, the throat, wrapping her in skeins of wire and pinning her to the old curtain rail that spanned the length of the windows.

Like an angler playing a fish, Youji wrapped his gloved fingers about the slack and tugged on the wire, feeling it cutting into his palms – feeling it jerking the woman's hands further up above her head. Watched as the harigane, glowing faintly and malevolently in the lamplight, tightened about her limbs, dug into the soft, pale flesh of her throat drawing droplets of blood, like bloody pearls strung on a piano-wire choker—and she was trying to heal over it, Youji realized with a sudden sick lurch. Her skin was trying to grow back over the wires that dug into it, and she could no more stop it from happening than she could keep herself from drawing breath.

"What are you doing?" Takagawa shrieked, struggling against the wires that constrained her and laying open the newly-formed skin again, sending fine rivulets of blood down her pinioned arms to slowly seep into the already-stained fabric of her suit. "I can't be killed, not now! You've _got_ to understand, you stupid boys, I could—"  
"Now, Aya!" Youji cut her off. "_Now_!"

Aya stepped calmly forward, katana gripped tightly in both hands, face as closed-off and inhuman and terrible in its beauty as that of an avenging angel's. Takagawa met his eyes and they were cold and narrow and utterly empty, as if the man behind them had put himself elsewhere – at least for now. Aya moved, and his motions were filled with terrible, deadly grace as he slipped into effortless life, blade poised to strike. And, with a smooth, even negligent flick of the wrist, he struck.

The katana transfixed her, neat as a butterfly skewered on a pin.

Takagawa's lips parted in a silent scream, her eyes wide and white-rimmed. A second of exquisite pain and then she was slumping forward, a trickle of blood running down her chin and welling slowly from the single wound in her chest as Aya stepped back, the katana slipping from her body as he turned away. Caught in her wire prison, it was only the wires cutting into her arms and throat that held Takagawa on her feet.

But already the bloodflow was slowing. Already Takagawa's chest was heaving as she snatched a breath, then another. She was still alive. They poisoned her, they laid open her flesh and ran her through – still she lived.

Youji took a pace back, the wire shrieking a protest; his free hand went to his lips as if to stifle a cry, but there was nothing. No words, no sound. Takagawa's shoulders shook; she gave a small, soft, choked-off sound, dying deep in the throat, and then another—oh _Christ_, Youji realized in numbed and horrified amazement, she's crying...

Crouched on the floor by Ken's side, Omi paled visibly, his face a study in terrible uncertainty and his fingers tightening about his friend's shoulders, gripping hard enough to bruise. Ken winced beneath his grasp, murmuring a soft and petulant protest, and opened his eyes. Snatching for orientation the boy blinked and looked up, casting about himself for something to anchor himself: he saw only Takagawa, like a creature from a nightmare, raise her head and turn her eyes, one palest blue, the other merely black on white – irisless, glazed and unfocused, but pain-filled and tear-glazed – upon them.

"Jesus _fuck_," Ken said, the words caught and carried on his breath, like an afterthought.

And nothing happened. They simply stood and waited, caught like actors before the cameras have started rolling, waiting only for a cue. Takagawa's cheeks were tear-stained but her eyes – if looks could kill – blazed with naked fury, promising death to anyone who strayed close enough to touch: Omi clung to Ken like a drowning man to driftwood, as if Ken was the only thing he could be sure of any more. Even through his gloves, Youji could feel the play of his breath against his fingers, he could smell warm leather and the faintest copper taint of blood, but he had no idea whose it was.

Aya snapped out of it first, hands tightening about the hilt of his katana. Shifting slightly, flowing into a different stance natural as music flowing into a key change, he raised the sword, the blood-smeared blade gleaming slightly in the half-light. Youji let his hand fall from his lips, tearing his gaze from Takagawa: he turned to Aya, and saw nothing to comfort him there.

"Aya," Youji heard himself say, "are you sure you want to—"  
The redhead simply nodded. "Step aside," he said, and there was no mistaking the authority in his voice. This has gone on long enough. "It's time this was finished."

Someone has to end this, and how else could it end? Aya moved—

"Aya-kun!" Omi cried: it could have been a warning, or a plea.

And much too late for afterthoughts, now. He moved, darting sure-footed toward Takagawa, and her ruined eyes met Aya's for a single suspended moment, a moment that lasted no more than a fraction of a second and felt like a lifetime and, for Elizabeth Takagawa, it was. It was all the time she had left. The katana described an elegant parabola as Aya swung for her, removing her head in a single swipe.

It had been, at the last, a quick, clean death: it had almost even been clinical. After everything Takagawa had suffered, it was the least that they could do for her. That hadn't been a mission, it had been butchery.

The woman's head struck the floor with a soft, final _thud_. Takagawa's body slumped again, hanging limply in its wire cocoon: Youji severed the wire from his watch and her corpse collapsed to the floor, pitching forward and lying, finally, still. Blood, thick and sticky as warm wax, shining slightly in the dim light, leaked slowly from its wounds. But finished now, finally: like a monster from a folk tale, something beautiful and terrible in equal measure, the only way they could kill Takagawa was by severing her head.

"Is it over?" Ken, breaking the sudden silence. What the Hell happened?  
Youji nodded slowly. "Yeah, Kenken," he said, and his voice was hushed. "Yeah. It's over." Not even she could come back from that. Nothing could.  
"Oh," Ken said simply, flatly. He sounded confused. He added, almost as an afterthought, "What _was_ she?"  
"Biokine," Omi said, in the same low, hushed tones, as if he were talking in church.  
Ken blinked up at him. "What?"  
"That's what they call them, Ken-kun," Omi said, getting to his feet and holding out one hand to help Aya drag Ken back to his. "She was a biokine. Are you okay?"  
"Uh. Yeah. I could kinda do with getting an early night, though…" Blinking slightly dazedly, Ken let himself be helped up, resting one hand on Aya's shoulder to help himself balance, and Aya wrapped his arm about the boy's waist, taking his weight. Ken placed one hand on his brow and started, quietly, to laugh.

Stooping, Omi collected up his scattered darts, slipping them back into the case nestling inside his jacket, then pocketed the butt of Youji's forgotten cigarette. He smiled weary as a parent and shook his head slightly as he caught sight of Youji who, framed by the window, was quietly lighting another one, his face briefly illuminated by the flickering flame of his lighter.

Sighing, the teenager turned to leave; it was all he could do. The mission was over. There was nothing left but to go home.

Youji likewise. Cautious as a parent creeping from the nursery, Youji slipped from the room in his teammates' wake and quietly closed the door after them, leaving behind him the corpse of a woman who, for all she had been warped and immoral, and for all her methods had been twisted, had dared to dream she could change the world. She had done wrong and known it was wrong: she killed, but she had told herself she did it for a reason. Some day, when she had learned how to help people to live instead of merely forcing them to their deaths, nobody would have to die like that ever again…

I just want to fix things, she had said. I want to help… Whoever she had been beneath the camouflage, her intentions at least had been good. She had wanted, some day, to help people to live: Weiss, Youji knew, couldn't even claim that much.

"Come on," Aya said. "Let's go."

Not when Weiss just dealt death, with surgical precision, and all the impassivity of a doctor.

_-ende-_


End file.
